I first met Rafi Eitan in 2006, when he was elected to the Knesset as head of the Gil pensioners' party, which was the surprise of the election, winning seven seats. Eitan was given the senior citizens portfolio in Ehud Olmert's government.
I recall that during my first interview with him in the Knesset cafeteria, while covering the parliamentary beat for Haaretz, I took note that although he was already 70 years old, with waning vision and hearing, his memory was excellent, his thought process was nimble and his answers were razor sharp. He remembered details from events that occurred within his company in the Yiftach Brigade during the War of Independence; he remembered how he captured the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann; and what Yasser Arafat told him when they met in 1965. The only topic he didn't want to discuss – his relationship with former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Eitan, who was part owner of a company that owned vast orchard fields in Cuba, said curtly: "I don't work with Castro. I'm a farmer in Cuba, everything else is journalistic bluster."
Rafi Eitan's contributions to the Israeli intelligence community were immense. He served in the Shin Bet and Mossad and helped command the operation to capture Eichmann in Argentina. "As I was grabbing Eichmann's head, in my head I was humming the words to "The Partisan's Song": "Never say the final journey is at hand."
Eitan served as a special adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1975 and then as chief adviser for fighting terror for Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. In 1981, he was appointed by then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to head the ministry's Bureau of Scientific Relations (known as "Lakam" in Hebrew), where he played a key role in the Jonathan Pollard spy scandal. As a result of the affair, Eitan was forced to retire from the intelligence community and Lakam was dismantled.
Pollard accused Eitan of abandoning him. Eventually, Eitan admitted he was the one who gave the order to refuse Pollard and his wife asylum in the Israeli Embassy in Washington during their attempt to evade the American authorities.
In 2006, when Pollard was still in prison, I asked Eitan how he felt about the public campaigns against him by groups advocating for Pollard's release. "I'm indifferent. These protests have no value. They don't help Pollard and they hurt me. I already took responsibility for his incarceration years ago. I didn't shift the blame on anyone else. When a person is involved in intelligence work, there are also failures."
