Rafi Eitan

Biography

He got the nickname “Rafi the Stinker” because he crawled through sewer pipes to reach the British radar station on Mount Carmel.

He was born Rafael Hantman (he took the name Eitan later) on 23 November 1926 on Kibbutz Ein Harod, to a family of immigrants from Russia who had come to Mandatory Palestine in 1923. His father, Noah Hantman, was a farmer and poet; his mother, Yehudit, did social work. His childhood was spent in Ramat HaSharon, and he finished school in 1940 at the agricultural school in Givat HaShlosha. At twelve he joined the Haganah, and after school, in 1944, he entered its strike units, the Palmach. There he helped receive illegal Jewish immigrants from Europe, took part in freeing detainees from the Atlit camp, in the Night of the Bridges, and in blowing up the radar station on the Carmel, which the British used to track ships carrying immigrants. It was then that he met Yitzhak Rabin. During one operation to receive immigrants a mine exploded beside him, and he went almost completely deaf; he wore hearing aids for the rest of his life.

In the war of 1947–1949 he served in the Yiftach Brigade, was wounded the day after independence was declared, and later worked as an intelligence officer.

After his discharge in 1949 Eitan took up livestock farming in the western Negev. A year later Isser Harel invited him to join the Shin Bet, the internal security service, and in 1955 he followed Harel to the Mossad. In 1955 he also began studying at the London School of Economics, but did not finish the course and returned to Israel in 1958. From 1959 he headed an operational unit of the Shin Bet that also worked for the Mossad.

In May 1960 Eitan commanded the team that seized the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel; a court in Jerusalem sentenced Eichmann to death. During the preparations Eitan is said to have personally rejected a proposal to capture Josef Mengele as well, fearing it would jeopardise the main goal. This episode is hard to check against documents, and I give it with that reservation. In 1964–1966 he led an operation connected with German arms deliveries to Egypt; in 1968 he visited the American NUMEC plant, from which highly enriched uranium had disappeared (the so-called Apollo Affair); and later he took part in preparing the strike on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak in June 1981.

In 1972 Eitan resigned and went into private business, among other things raising tropical fish. In 1978, at the invitation of Ariel Sharon, he returned to government service as adviser on counterterrorism to the prime minister. In 1981 he took charge of Lekem, the Bureau of Scientific Relations at the Ministry of Defense: a secret agency that obtained technology abroad for Israel’s defense industry.

On 21 November 1985 Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy intelligence analyst working for Lekem, was arrested in Washington. Israel at first described the operation as unauthorised and acknowledged responsibility only in 1998. Pollard received a life sentence. A case of krytron smuggling to Israel came to light soon after, and in 1986 the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu told the Sunday Times about Israel’s nuclear programme. Lekem was disbanded, and Eitan resigned.

After that he headed the state-owned Israel Chemicals Corporation; by one account he was removed from the post in 1990, by another he remained until 1993. He then went into business, including agricultural and construction projects in Cuba.

In 2006, on the eve of the elections to the 17th Knesset, the 79-year-old Eitan became leader of the pensioners’ party Gil, which had never before cleared the electoral threshold. The party won seven seats, and he became the first Minister of Senior Citizens in Israel’s history (2007–2009). In the 2009 elections the party failed to pass the threshold, and he lost his seat in parliament.

For many years Eitan made sculpture: over thirty years he produced more than a hundred works. He died on 23 March 2019 in Tel Aviv, aged 92, and was buried in Netanya at a civil ceremony. In 2020 his autobiography, “Ish Hasod” (“The Secret Man”), was published.