he took over the Mossad a year after it was created in 1951. As chief of two of the nation's three intelligence agencies, Harel wielded considerable power in Israel's first 15 years. In 1957, members of the West German government provided Israel with information that Adolf Eichmann was hiding in Argentina under the name "Ricardo Klement". Eichmann, as director of Department IV-B4 of Nazi Germany's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) during the Second World War, had played a crucial role in the planning and execution of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion believed that seeking Eichmann's extradition from Argentina by legal and diplomatic methods would be unsuccessful. In 1959, he placed Harel in charge of the operation to locate, seize, and secretly extract Eichmann from Argentina, with the intention of returning him to Israel to stand trial. In April 1960, Harel's team of agents arrived in Buenos Aires, and tracked Eichmann to a residence in the San Fernando neighborhood of the city. Harel followed soon after. On May 11, they kidnapped Eichmann as he walked from a bus stop to his home. Days later, Eichmann was drugged and clandestinely placed on an Israeli diplomatic aircraft, disguised as a crew member. He was flown to Tel Aviv. According to Harel himself, when he arrived back in Israel with the captured Eichmann, Harel went to Ben-Gurion's office and told the prime minister: "I've brought you a present. Eichmann is here." Harel later stated that it was his belief that if the Eichmann operation had begun some weeks earlier, the Mossad may have had a chance to apprehend Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious physician who presided over the selections on the train platform at Auschwitz. His book about the operation, The House on Garibaldi Street, became a best-seller and a 1979 television film (The House on Garibaldi Street). Harel was also responsible for the intelligence coup that cemented the Mossad's reputation with Western intelligence agencies. In March 1956, three years after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's "cult of personality" and brutal paranoia in a speech before a closed session of the Communist Party's 20th Congress. Word spread of this event, but U.S. intelligence agencies were unable to obtain the text of the so-called "Secret Speech". The Soviet politburo delivered copies of the speech to a few Eastern-bloc countries;