Avraham Shalom, Hunter of Eichmann, Dies at 86

Jerusalem: Avraham Shalom, who helped track down Adolf Eichmann and led Israel's internal security agency in a long spying career for his country before resigning under a cloud over the killing of two Palestinian hijackers, died Thursday in Tel Aviv. He was 86.

A spokesman for the security agency, the Shin Bet, confirmed the death, giving no cause.

Shalom was recruited by the Shin Bet in 1950 as a former member of the elite Jewish fighting force Palmach, which he had joined in 1946, two years before the state of Israel was founded.

In 1960, he was the deputy commander of a team of four agents from the Shin Bet and Mossad intelligence services who tracked Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, to Argentina, where he was living under an assumed identity.

The team captured Eichmann and spirited him out of the country to Israel, where he was tried as an architect of the Holocaust and executed two years later.

Shalom was engaged in a struggle against Arab enemies for much of his career.

In 1972, after 11 members of Israel's Olympic team were massacred at the Munich Games, he was made commander of the Shin Bet security division, responsible for protecting Israeli delegations abroad.

After 30 years of service, he was appointed agency chief in 1980. In that post he had to contend with the emergence of a Jewish underground made up of militant extremists who killed three Palestinian students at a college in the West Bank city of Hebron and planted bombs that maimed two West Bank mayors. Some 20 Jewish settlers were convicted but later pardoned.

Shalom's career was upended by what became known as the Bus 300 affair. In April 1984, four Palestinians hijacked a civilian bus - No. 300 in the Egged transit company fleet - traveling from Tel Aviv to the southern coastal city of Ashkelon. Israeli forces halted the bus in the Gaza Strip as it headed toward the border with Egypt with 40 hostages aboard and stormed it.

Official reports issued soon after the attack said that all four hijackers had been killed in the assault, but an Israeli photographer saw two of them, both wounded, being led away for interrogation. An incriminating photograph appeared the next day on the front page of an Israeli newspaper, creating a sensation.

Shalom, one of several senior officials at the scene, was widely suspected of having ordered the killings of the two Palestinians, but his subsequent downfall was as much about his efforts to cover up the affair and deflect the blame from his agency by lying to investigators.

He resigned in 1986 in a deal in which he and other Shin Bet officials were given presidential pardons. Shalom maintained that he had always acted with the authorization of the government.

Moshe Arens, who was defense minister at the time, said of Shalom, "All of his career he served the people of Israel." In the case of Bus 300, Arens told Israel Radio on Thursday, he assumed that Shalom had "acted in the spirit of the times."

In their 1990 book, "Every Spy a Prince," journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman called him "quiet, ascetic and cold."

Shalom, formerly known as Avraham Bendor, was born in 1928 (some sources say on June 7) in Vienna and immigrated with his parents to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, at age 11. He fought in Israel's 1948 War of Independence.

After resigning from the Shin Bet, he became a peace advocate, helping to found the Geneva Initiative, a group promoting a permanent pact between Israelis and Palestinians.

Shalom was back in the limelight in 2012 as one of six former Shin Bet chiefs interviewed for the Oscar-nominated documentary "The Gatekeepers." In the film, by the director Dror Moreh, he was critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

He also spoke of the night of the bus hijacking. He said that by the time the two militants were in custody, they were "almost dead" after being beaten by soldiers. "So I said: 'Hit them again and finish it,'" he recalled. Of one soldier, he said, "I think he took a rock and smashed their heads in." He added, "In the war against terror, forget about morality."

After the Bus 300 affair, he said, he lost faith in the politicians who, he felt, had abandoned him. "They left a casualty in the field," he said. "Not only me, the whole agency."