Cleaning up the kitchen tonight, I caught the C-Span Book TV coverage of Neal Bascomb's Hunting Eichmann, about the capture and abduction of the chief bean-counter of the Nazi holocaust. It mostly came as a surprise to me: maybe I just hadn't been paying attention (I hadn't) but I always assumed that the Eichmann pinch was a straight-line success story: the first great triumph of the all-seeing, all-knowing, invincible Mossad.
I guess I should have known better. Turns out it was almost entirely a bottom-up operation. One woman in Argentina spotted Eichmann. Neither Mossad, nor German intelligence (nor, for what it is worth the CIA) wanted much of anything to do with the case--they were all for letting the dead bury the dead. The Argentine made contact with one prosecutor in Germany; he went to Mossad not once but more than once before he finally got matters in motion.
Clancy Sigal in an instructive Washington Post review (reprinted at Amazon) complains that theere isn't a lot of suspense to the story. He's right in a sense: this is not the stuff of an old-time Made-for-TV movie. But sensibilities are different now. It would be (maybe it will be) fun to see the story as a fable of the plucky amateur against bureaucratic indifference.
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