A Spy Turned Artist Found a Fugitive, Then Found His Subject
May 6, 2003
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
He will forever be known as the man who captured Adolf
Eichmann. But more than 40 years after he snatched that fugitive Nazi off a street in Argentina to face judgment in
Jerusalem for directing the mass murder of Jews, Peter Zvi Malkin is making a new mark as the man who captured
Eichmann on paper.
As an artist Mr. Malkin long used his gift for drawing and
painting as a cover for his operations for the Israeli secret services, including his 1960 Mossad mission to
kidnap Eichmann. Now his work has been collected in a two-volume set of images that memorialize his time in
Argentina, family members he lost to the Holocaust and a rainbow world of vibrant humanity.
"For me painting is like an operation," he said, speaking
of spy work. "The most difficult thing is the idea."
Now in his vigorous 70's with the build of a fireplug, he
lives in the East 30's in Manhattan and keeps a studio on the Lower East Side. In an interview he proudly leafed
through the new books, which reproduce about 175 of his vividly colored expressionistic paintings, many made while
he stalked and guarded Eichmann.
Many of his works cry out with his prose poems and letters
from his children in English and Hebrew, the words boldly printed over images of maps, foreign guidebooks and
telephone book pages, a pentimento of distant and vanished worlds.
Some of his work, with strong planes of color and black
outlines, recalls Georges Rouault, but Mr. Malkin said: "I'll tell you the truth. I didn't know who is
Rouault." Rather, he said, he was influenced by stained glass images in Argentina's churches.
Critics in Israel, Europe and Latin America have praised
his work. The Jerusalem Post called him a "naïf of formidable powers."
He also received a rave review from New York's most
venerable prosecutor. "He's an extremely talented artist, and he did some of his work under the most difficult and
trying circumstances, when guarding an all-time murderer," said Robert M.
Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who is also a fan of Mr. Malkin's undercover work.
The first volume, "The Argentina Journal," has previously
exhibited work mostly from a 1960 South American guidebook that Mr. Malkin covered with paintings and drawings on the
Eichmann mission. One is a pencil portrait of Eichmann over a map of South America.
"You paint?" he said Eichmann once asked him, having caught
a glimpse of his makeshift sketchbook. Breaking a ban on chitchat with the prisoner, Mr.
Malkin, who speaks seven languages, said he replied, "Yes, I play with paint." The
two ended up carrying on a stilted dialogue of sorts, Mr. Malkin recounted in his 1990 book, "Eichmann in My Hands,"
written with Harry Stein.
The companion to "The Argentina Journal," called "Casting
Pebbles on the Water With a Cluster of Colors," has new work: images of lovers, crowd scenes and still lifes
superimposed on pages of a small atlas. It was inspired, Mr. Malkin wrote, by the Jewish tradition of casting bread
upon the water "to give, asking nothing in return but to be blessed."
He began preparing the books after meeting the woman who
became his editor, Patricia G. Ambinder, in 1995. To accompany the Argentina pictures, he wrote some 60 essays
in Hebrew and translated them into English, which she then edited. "He's probably the most humane man I've ever worked
with," Ms. Ambinder said, "which is why he's able to do superhuman things." (The books, published by VWF
Publishing, are sold at $90 a set through www.peterzmalkin.com or through major online booksellers.)
Mr. Malkin (who also goes by
Malchin, the name he was given at birth) said he spent 27 years in the Israeli secret services, ultimately as operations director and
often under the cover of a traveling artist. Even today, with Mr. Malkin long out of intelligence work, his studio
in a housing project at the easternmost end of Grand Street abutting the F.D.R. Drive seems suspiciously clean and
orderly, but, he said, he indeed works there nights producing the canvases that are all over. "By dirty doesn't
show you're a good painter," he said. His snooping taught him to leave places immaculate, he said: "In the secret
service, it's not how you go in, it's how you go out."
He was born in British Palestine around 1929 and within a
few years traveled twice with his parents back to their birthplace in Poland in an ultimately futile effort to
rescue his married older sister, Fruma, and her family. They later perished in the Holocaust, along with 150 of his
other relatives, Mr. Malkin said.
As a schoolboy, he wrote, he was recruited into the
Haganah, the underground army fighting for a Jewish nation. He fought in the war for independence in 1948, he said, and
later joined the country's secret service, then called Shin Beth, specializing in safecracking and explosives.
"I never killed anybody in my life," Mr. Malkin said. But
he led many operations he will not discuss, saying only, "I helped get information."
Among his proudest exploits, he said, was obtaining a list
of former Nazi rocket scientists working for Egypt. He said he once eavesdropped on a meeting of Arab officials by
hiding under their conference table. He was picked up or arrested about 40 times, he said, always talking his way
out of trouble.
After an initially discounted 1957 tip exposed the
whereabouts and alias of Eichmann, the Mossad leader Isser Harel sent a commando team of Mr. Malkin and six others to
Buenos Aires to bring Eichmann back alive.
During surveillance around the suburb of San Fernando,
where Eichmann was living as Ricardo Klement, Mr. Malkin had lots of time, he said, to fill his guidebook with
images in water colors, acrylic and even the makeup that was kept on hand to disguise Eichmann when they caught him.
"I spent a lot of time in churches," he said, showing the
paintings of stained glass windows. "If you go to a synagogue, someone is always asking if you're alone, if
you're married. In a church in a hundred years no one would ask." He also painted local people and the safe houses his
team had prepared, members of his lost family and even a schematic of the kidnapping plan.
"It was like a race between me and the pictures," Mr.
Malkin said. "I wanted to finish covering the Argentina pages before I left."
In May 1960 Mr.
Malkin, wearing gloves out of revulsion over touching Eichmann, grabbed him as he got off a bus
near his home. Fellow agents bundled him into a waiting car and sped him to a nearby safe house, where Mr. Malkin often
sketched while guarding him. Eichmann, drugged and disguised as a hung-over airline steward, was soon smuggled
to Israel aboard an El Al jetliner. After a four-month trial the next year, he was found guilty of crimes against
humanity. He was hanged and cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean.
The story was told on television in 1996 in "The Man Who
Captured Eichmann," with Arliss Howard as Mr. Malkin and Robert Duvall as
Eichmann.
Mr. Malkin said he retired from Mossad in 1976 to devote
himself to painting, lecturing and private security work. "I'm out of the secret service business for sure," he said.
"But I help."
One of those he helped was Mr.
Morgenthau, who in the late 1970's was investigating two rogue C.I.A. agents, Frank
Terpil and Edwin P. Wilson, who were suspected of selling weapons and explosives to the Libyans and Ugandans. Wary of
going to the C.I.A., Mr. Morgenthau said he approached Mossad and was put in touch with Mr.
Malkin. "He gave us some very, very valuable information," he said. The two
C.I.A. men were later convicted, but Mr. Terpil fled to Syria, then Cuba.
Mr. Morgenthau said he in turn helped Mr. Malkin get his
green card. Mr. Malkin has since been naturalized while retaining Israeli citizenship. He goes back and forth to
Israel, where his wife, Roni, lives. One of their sons, Omer, a financial consultant, was in the World Trade
Center's south tower on Sept. 11, 2001, and narrowly missed the attack when he left his office to meet his father, who
was a few blocks away.
In a Chinatown restaurant, where he was being interviewed,
Mr. Malkin reached for the check. A reporter grabbed it first. Mr. Malkin snatched it away good-naturedly. "I shoot
you if you do that," he said.
Copyright
© 2003 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
