Isser Harel

Israeli spymaster who abducted Eichmann

Isser Halperin (Isser Harel), intelligence officer: born Vitebsk, Russia 1912; married (one daughter); died Tel Aviv 18 February 2003.

No Israeli spymaster, before or since, has exercised as much power as Isser Harel, the man who brought the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to justice and slipped the Central Intelligence Agency the text of Nikita Khrushchev's historic 1956 speech denouncing Joseph Stalin. Harel commanded the Shin Bet internal security service for 15 years and its overseas stablemate, the Mossad, for 11. He was answerable only to the first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Although Harel founded neither service, he transformed them into the instruments of a nation state after Israel achieved independence in 1948. He created the structure and infrastructure of both and coordinated them with military intelligence, the Foreign Ministry's research department and the police special branch.

His agents revered him. Decades after retirement, they would still check with the intense little man with the bald head and protruding ears before publicising any of their exploits. He set them austere standards, of dedication and life style. Reuven Merhav, a secret service veteran who now comments on Middle East affairs for Israel's Channel 10 television, recalls that, when hunting Eichmann in Europe or South America, Harel disdained the luxury of a hotel room and slept on an office camp bed.

He was fiercely loyal to Ben- Gurion. Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli author of biographies of both men, found evidence in the Prime Minister's diaries that Harel spied on opposition leaders, of the right and left, for his political master. Harel was a member of the Mapai Labour party, which in those early years identified its own interests with those of the state.

His book on the abduction of Eichmann, The House on Garibaldi Street (1975), earned Harel international celebrity. He and his team picked up Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street in 1960 and smuggled him to Israel aboard an El Al plane that had brought the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, on an official visit. Harel went straight to Ben-Gurion. "I have brought you a present," he told the Prime Minister. "Eichmann is here." The prisoner was tried and hanged for his role in shipping millions of European Jews to the Nazi gas chambers.

Yet it was another of Harel's achievements – acquisition of Khrushchev's speech to the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party – that won Mossad the respect of its peers. The text had been distributed to sister Communist parties in Eastern Europe. Viktor Grayevsky, a Jewish journalist on a Polish Communist newspaper, passed it to the Israelis. They in turn handed it to the Americans, who had been desperately seeking a copy of their own. It was, as one professional put it, "the beginning of a beautiful friendship".

Harel was a hands-on chief, a compulsive spy hunter. He trusted himself more than he trusted anyone else. Subordinates say that he had a sixth sense for treachery. He suspected a diplomat in the Israeli embassy in Yugoslavia of being a Soviet spy, but had no proof. Harel confronted the man and said: "I know you're a Russian spy. You might as well admit it." The man broke down and confessed.

His greatest coup in this field was to unmask Israel Beer, a Soviet mole who had penetrated Ben- Gurion's inner circle. Beer, who presented himself as an Austrian Jew, was one of the Prime Minister's most trusted defence advisers. Harel established that the real Israel Beer had died in Vienna years before. The bogus Beer, whose true identity was never discovered, spent the rest of his days in prison.

He was convinced that the honour of the state was in his hands. In 1962, he committed all the formidable resources of the secret services – and his own prestige – to tracing Yossele Schumacher, an eight-year-old boy who had been kidnapped by his grandfather and a sect of religious Jewish fanatics. The search spread to Europe and the United States before Yossele was found in New York and returned to his secular parents in Israel.

Indirectly, it was the Eichmann affair that led to Harel's downfall. He became obsessed with the Holocaust. When the Mossad learned in 1962 that a team of German scientists were building rockets for the Egyptians to use against Israel, he launched a campaign of murderous intimidation against them and their families.

Ben-Gurion, who was proud of having reconciled Israel and Germany, to the benefit of both, was furious. He accused Harel of getting the rocket scientists out of proportion. Two other security advisers – the young Shimon Peres and the military intelligence chief Meir Amit – insisted that the scientists were third-rate and that Egypt lacked the raw material for a successful attack.

Amit and Peres, who was then director-general of the Defence Ministry, were proved right. For the first time, Harel felt he had lost Ben-Gurion's confidence. When the Prime Minister ordered him to resign, he acquiesced. Although he returned briefly as an adviser to a future prime minister, Levi Eshkol, it was the end of his career as Israel's most powerful spymaster.

Isser Harel was born Isser Halperin in 1912 into a prosperous business family in Vitebsk, the same Russian town as the Jewish painter Marc Chagall. The family moved to Latvia after the Communist Revolution. Young Isser migrated to Palestine, then under British rule, in 1931. He and his wife Rivka settled on Shefayim, a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv, and worked in agriculture.

He joined the Haganah defence force in 1942, becoming head of intelligence two years later. After the 1948 War of Independence, Harel took over the Shin Bet. He added the Mossad in 1952.

After his enforced resignation in 1963, he wrote his book on the Eichmann affair, then dabbled unsuccessfully in politics. He lived out his days as a grey eminence, writing, lecturing and occasionally quarrelling with old friends and foes in a bungalow in Zahala, a leafy Tel Aviv suburb built for ex-officers and ex-spies.

Eric Silver