Peter Malkin, Mossad agent who caught Nazi Eichmann

WASHINGTON -- Peter Z. Malkin, the Jewish guerrilla and Israeli intelligence agent who captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann on a street in Buenos Aires, died Tuesday in New York. He was 77.

No cause of death was disclosed.

Mr. Malkin was born in Poland and grew up in the British mandate of Palestine. By age 12, he had been recruited to fight with the Haganah, the Jewish underground forces. He became an explosives specialist and was known for donning all manner of disguises. For years, he posed as an itinerant painter. He also developed an expertise in martial arts.

In time, he served as chief of operations for the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad.

His most famous exploit was snatching Eichmann on May 11, 1960. Eichmann, a key architect of the Nazi Holocaust who coined the term ''Final Solution," had fled to Argentina in the early 1950s. He used a pseudonym, lived in a working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, and worked quietly at a Mercedes-Benz plant.

After receiving a tip, the Mossad sent investigators to Argentina. Some, Mr. Malkin said, made ''gaffes almost beyond invention." One overturned a jeep in the quiet neighborhood; another, hoping to talk to Eichmann and his family, used a cover story about being a businessman seeking to build a factory nearby.

Appalled, Mr. Malkin told his bosses that any successful operation would have to involve just himself and maybe two or three others as backup. Asked by his superior how he might manage to subdue Eichmann, who was expected to resist, Mr. Malkin placed his boss in a painful chokehold.

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Malkin left for Argentina with an elite commando team and spent months planning for all contingencies, including how to hold Eichmann in a safe house before spiriting him to Israel. To maintain his cover, he drew stained-glass windows in churches.

''I spent a lot of time in churches," he told The New York Times. ''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."

On the appointed day, he passed Eichmann in the street and, as planned, said to the approaching man the only words he knew in Spanish, ''Un momentito, senor." They struggled, and Mr. Malkin overpowered Eichmann, dragging him into a waiting car.

In his memoir, ''Eichmann in My Hands" (1990), Mr. Malkin described being surprised at how undistinguished and rather bony Eichmann looked. He was expecting a ''monster."

He said his interrogations of Eichmann were freakishly revealing, as when he confronted Eichmann about the death of Mr. Malkin's nephew in Poland: ''My sister's boy, my favorite playmate, he was just your son's age. Also blond and blue-eyed, just like your son. And you killed him."

Mr. Malkin wrote: ''Genuinely perplexed by the observation, he actually waited a moment to see if I would clarify it. 'Yes,' he said finally, 'but he was Jewish, wasn't he?' "

Eichmann was tried and hanged in Israel in 1962.

Born Zvi Malchin, he was 4 when his family, having suffered anti-Semitic indignities for years, decided to leave Poland for Palestine in 1933. Because of a shortage of exit visas, Mr. Malkin's 23-year-old sister stayed behind. She perished in the Holocaust.

In the comparative security of Palestine, Mr. Malkin described himself as growing ''cocky and apparently fearless" as a young man.

He wrote: ''Before long, I attached myself to a group, roaming the winding passageways every day after school, scaling ancient walls and exploring abandoned basements and storerooms, playing pirates and cowboys and soccer on cobblestoned streets beneath a thick canopy of hung laundry. These guys liked to regard themselves as tough, and, though younger and smaller, I was determined to keep up with them."

A teacher in his school recruited him in 1939 to the Haganah, which was then fighting the Arabs and the British. In time, he began pilfering ammunition from police stations.

After high school graduation in 1947, he undertook explosives training with a motley crew of young men with strange quirks. One he described as impervious to all physical pain but ''would never fail to get upset about one thing: cooked carrots."

Mr. Malkin considered a career in engineering but found his reputation for safecracking preceded him at the Mossad, which he joined in 1950.

He worked on antiterrorism missions, helped capture spies, and retired from the Mossad in 1976. After settling in New York, he wrote, painted, and occasionally helped a friend, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, on investigations. Few other outlets were available to him.

''I found myself having to explain away to prospective employers a 27-year gap in my resume," he wrote.

His memoir was turned into a television film, ''The Man Who Captured Eichmann" (1996), and shown on the TNT cable network.