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The following is a neat version of the video transcript.
My name is Zvi Aharoni. It was Argentina, 1960. I had been looking for Ricardo Clement for a long time. The first clue came from a blind man named Lothar Hermann, who claimed to know the address where Clement lived with his family. I met with him, and after speaking with him, I took out an Argentine bank note and cut it in half. I gave one half to Hermann and kept the other half. I said if anyone came to him asking about any of the things we had discussed, they needed to produce the other half of the banknote; otherwise, don't trust them.
I went to the address in Buenos Aires which the blind man had claimed was the residence of Ricardo Clement and his family. It turned out to be a shabby little house in a rundown neighborhood, and I thought to myself, there's no way Ricardo Clement would live in a place like this. I had to start thinking that perhaps Ricardo Clement was not the man I was looking for after all. To make matters worse, I found out the family had just moved three weeks previously. But then something happened that told me I was on the right trail. When I went to inquire about the forwarding address left by the family, I was told the family explicitly left no forwarding address. Who doesn't leave a forwarding address unless they don't want to be found?
I followed the trail further into the dusty outskirts of Buenos Aires, to a little no-man's land where there weren't even official property lines on record. There I found a tiny house with no electricity and no running water. I was convinced Ricardo Clement lived there. What was that going to be like when I finally saw him?
On April 27th, I left my car about a mile from the house and walked to a railway embankment about a hundred yards from the area. At 7:40 p.m., the 203 bus from San Fernando pulled up a couple of blocks from the house, and a single passenger got off. It was Ricardo Clement.
Tonight, tell your family you love them. Hug your kids, hug your spouse. You see, I don't have much family left. Almost all of them were killed. Only me, my brother, and my mother survived. We were on the last train out of Germany. The Third Reich had taken away all the property of the Jews, expelled them from public life, and forced them to emigrate. They knew where it was all headed. Adolf Hitler had galvanized the hatred of the whole nation. His henchman Heinrich Himmler devoted his life to wiping out all the Jews, calling it a page of glory in our history. Reinhard Heydrich, whom they called the Man with the Iron Heart, organized the first killing squads. Then, at the Wannsee Conference, he formalized the plans to expand the murders on a massive scale. Joseph Goebbels constantly fueled the fire with propaganda. There was even the foremost authority on the Jews in the Third Reich, Adolf Eichmann, who engineered the whole system of extermination, transporting millions to the killing centers.
There were places like Treblinka, which covered over 30 acres. There were no prison barracks and there were no labor yards. Everyone getting off the train at Treblinka was killed immediately: 15,000 people a day, men, women, and children, sent straight to the gas chambers. In the end, they killed six million Jews. And yet one day it was all over, just like that. The Nazi Third Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years crumbled. The war broke out in 1939, and in 1945 Adolf Hitler bit down on a cyanide capsule, put a gun to his temple, and blew his brains out. In that same bunker, Joseph Goebbels killed all six of his children, then killed his wife, then killed himself. Reinhard Heydrich was killed in Czechoslovakia. Heinrich Himmler went on the run, posing as a lower officer, and when he was discovered, he bit down on a cyanide capsule and dropped to the ground.
The architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, fled to Austria and got a job as a lumberjack. Eventually, through the Red Cross lines, he got a fake passport and fled Europe. In 1950 he arrived in South America with a new home, a new job, and a new name, and that name was Ricardo Clement.
I sent a coded message back to Israel indicating that, yes, I had found Adolf Eichmann, he was alive, and yes, conditions were favorable to stage an abduction. At the time, the Argentinian government was sympathetic to the Nazis and even protected them. We couldn't just send a message to the embassy saying, "Hey, we think there's a guy in your country who's responsible for the deaths of six million people. We'd like to try him for crimes." They would have protected him.
A few days later, I knew it would be a risk, but I decided to see if I could determine where Eichmann got on the bus. I knew where he got off the bus every weekday at 7:40 p.m., but it was possible there might be a better place for the abduction. On May 4th, I boarded the 203 bus about eight stops before the previous town of San Fernando and immediately feared I had made a big mistake. Adolf Eichmann was already on the bus. I was hoping the bus driver would not ask me any questions and my foreign accent would not be heard. Fortunately, I put down my four pesos with no questions. Fate does funny things sometimes. On this day, the bus was almost entirely full and there was only one open seat. It was the one directly behind Adolf Eichmann. I sat there inches away from him and thought about the man he was in the Third Reich. In another life, I thought about my family, my aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, all killed. I thought about all my friends who had lost so many of their families in the Holocaust, which this man sitting in front of me had been the architect of. But I thought about one other thing: he had been found. The news that had hunted his friends after the war for what they had done, the noose that he thought he had escaped, had found him, and was closing in on him. Fifteen years after the end of the war, literally on the other side of the world, justice had finally caught up to him and was coming for him.
Over several days, the team of agents originating from Israel began arriving in Buenos Aires. There were logistics men, soldiers, a disguise expert, a document forger, and the doctor. To avoid suspicion, all arrived on different days from different countries, none of them with travel itineraries listing Argentina as a final destination. Of course, all had fake names and documentation. Several safe houses were rented and prepared.
On May 11, 1960, I left the main house in a car with three other agents. There was a second backup car behind us with three agents in it. In a hidden spot just outside the neighborhood, we switched the license plate to a fake diplomatic plate, which made us less likely to be stopped by police. A short distance from Eichmann's home, in another hidden spot, we switched the plate again to a different local plate. If the abduction went as planned, we would switch plates again for the drive to the safe house. Even though the safe house was south of Eichmann's home, we would drive north after abducting him, so if there were any witnesses, they would send the police in the wrong direction. If we were chased by the authorities, our first plan was to turn suddenly off the road, transfer the prisoner to the second car, and then drive the first car back onto the road to mislead them. If the chase got desperate, the second car was instructed to ram the police cars. If we found ourselves unable to escape the police, the captain of the team, Rafi Eitan, was instructed to handcuff himself to Adolf Eichmann with no key, and the man to be taken along with Eichmann to the nearest senior officer to explain that he and his volunteer friends had captured the war criminal with the plan of bringing him to the Argentinian authorities. Everyone else on the team would be completely on their own to get out of Argentina.
At 7:25 p.m., I drove past the bus stop and down the street near Eichmann's house. I parked about 25 meters from the main road. At 7:40 p.m., the bus that typically carried Eichmann passed by without stopping. Had he been tipped off? We continued to wait according to the plan. If he had not arrived by eight o'clock, we would leave, as our presence there for too long would arouse suspicion. This was a major problem for the mission. How could we possibly park there again the next day or two days later without being exposed? Eight o'clock came with no sign of Eichmann. Just as we were getting ready to leave, a bus pulled up from San Fernando, stopping to let off a single passenger. Through binoculars, I could see it was Eichmann, but I saw something I had not seen the other times I watched him get off the bus. This time, he had his hand in his coat pocket. He might have a gun. I told the other agents to watch out for a weapon. Instead of grabbing him by the neck, as originally planned, an agent now had to grab him by the hands first. This had not been rehearsed, and then, terribly, when the agent sprang on him, both of them fell into the ditch, with Eichmann screaming at the top of his lungs. The other two agents went to help. I was revving the engine to drown out the sound. We eventually got him into the back of the car and took off. No one followed us. He was under a blanket, held down by two agents.
The first words I ever said to Adolf Eichmann were, "Don't move, and no one will hurt you. If you resist, you'll be shot." There was no answer and no reaction. I asked him if he understood me. No answer. I asked him in Spanish what language he spoke. Still no answer. I began to worry that he had been hurt, had a heart attack, or something. It was a main priority to keep him healthy, because we needed to get him to Israel to stand trial before the world for what he had done. I started to worry that maybe we didn't even have the right guy. But he finally spoke up in perfect German, and I knew we had the man. The first words Adolf Eichmann ever uttered to me were "Ich bin bereit, mein Schicksal zu tragen," which in English means, "I have already resigned myself to my fate."