What the CIA told the State Department about Eichmann (July 1960)

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In late May 1960 Israel announced that it held Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had organized the deportation of Europe's Jews. On 21 June a Mr. Radford at the State Department asked the CIA what it knew about him. The answer, dated 21 July 1960 and stamped Secret, is this memo: three typed pages and a routing slip, built mostly from US Army counterintelligence reports¹. It shows what American intelligence had on file about Eichmann and where it had come from, and it was written after Mossad had already caught him, not before (The capture of Adolf Eichmann)^1,2.

What the memo says

Most of it is a 1947 report from the Counter Intelligence Corps detachment in Salzburg, retold paragraph by paragraph. It traces Eichmann's career from the SD in Berlin and a 1937 trip to Palestine to the emigration offices in Vienna and Prague, the 1940 Madagascar plan, Theresienstadt and Budapest in 1944. It also repeats his claim to come from a German Templer family near Tel Aviv¹.

The 1947 material has errors. It puts his birth in 1907 at "Sollingen"; he was born in Solingen on 19 March 1906. The Templer story was false, and a claim that he fled to Palestine in late 1945 "disguised as a Jew" was rumor^1,5.

The later reports follow. In 1952 an Army report placed a "Heinz Eichmann", thought to be him, in Egypt as an adviser to the Egyptian army. A report of July 1953 had him traveling from Baghdad to Damascus with the Grand Mufti. An unevaluated report of January 1954 described a Karl Heinz Eichmann who had escaped a US prisoner-of-war camp in Italy and gone to Syria¹. The historians Richard Breitman and Norman Goda later showed that CIA reports had mixed Adolf Eichmann up with a different man, Karl Heinz Eichmann³. The memo then ends with a single sentence from March 1958: he had lived in Argentina as "Clemens" since 1952 but now lived in Jerusalem¹.

The 1958 report

That sentence is why the memo is cited. Eichmann had in fact gone to Argentina in 1950 and lived there as Ricardo Klement^3,5. Timothy Naftali, writing for the National Archives working group on Nazi war crimes in 2006, identified the source of the March 1958 report as the West German service, the BND. He found that the alias was close enough to the real one to have led to Eichmann, but that the CIA did not act on the report because chasing war criminals was not then US policy. As far as he could tell, neither service passed it to Israel⁴. Breitman and Goda, writing in 2010, called it "unconfirmed but accurate" information buried among false rumors³.

Release and reading it

The memo carries a Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act review stamp (NWC-000398); this copy was approved for release in the CIA reading room on 1 March 2023. Nothing on the typed pages is blacked out¹. The fourth page is the routing slip, which notes that the memo was based on the 1947 Army report from the 430th CIC detachment¹.

Read it as a file search done for another department after the fact, not an assessment. It weighs nothing, so the one accurate lead sits on the same page as the rumors. The archivist Robert Wolfe, surveying the CIA's whole Eichmann file, found it was mostly hearsay and unconfirmed rumor about his whereabouts, and that the agency joined the search late².