Peter Malkin, who died Tuesday in Manhattan, was the Israeli secret agent who stalked and captured the notorious head of the Gestapo’s Department of Jewish Affairs, Adolf Eichmann, whose responsibilities included sending millions to German concentration camps during World War II.

Malkin, who was thought to be 77, died after being hospitalized for an infection, friends said.

“I think he was the outstanding intelligence agent of the 20th century,” a longtime friend who worked on several international cases with Malkin, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, said.

In an action as dramatic as any in the history of espionage, Malkin and a team of Mossad agents apprehended Eichmann, who was living under an assumed name, in Argentina in 1960 and smuggled him out of the country. Eichmann was later put on trial in Israel and hanged, the only person in the history of that country ever to be executed.

Malkin directed the surveillance that led to Eichmann’s capture. It was Malkin who approached the unsuspecting Eichmann on Garibaldi Street in San Fernando, Argentina. After attracting Eichmann’s attention with a hurried “Un momentito, senor,” Malkin wrestled the Nazi to the ground and with compatriots bundled him into a car and took him to a nearby safe house, where he was held incommunicado. Malkin told the story in “Eichmann in My Hands” (1990), in which he discloses that he wore gloves out of revulsion for the man he held responsible for the death of his sister and 150 relatives.

Although he will be remembered most saliently for his pivotal, and long secret, role in the Eichmann affair, Malkin was an important Mossad agent for more than 25 years. He was involved in many missions over the years, some of which seem actually to have been officially confirmed, such as his role in 1961 in catching Israel Baer, a Soviet agent who had penetrated to the highest levels of Israel’s government as a close adviser to the prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. More shadowy tales of his exploits abroad were told as well.

During foreign postings, Malkin posed as an artist – and in fact he showed great talent, “a naif of formidable powers,” according to a critic of the Jerusalem Post. During the Eichmann operation, Malkin created a visual record of his feelings by drawing in an Argentinean guidebook. The collages he created, including a remarkable drawing of Eichmann superimposed on a map of Argentina, were exhibited internationally in the 1990s.

Malkin retired as head of operations of the Mossad in 1976. He eventually moved to New York, where he worked as a security consultant and painted. He also wrote poetry and thrillers, and recently published a two-volume set of art and essays.

Born Zvi Malchin in British Palestine, Malkin as a youth returned often to his parents’ home at Zolkiewka, where they endeavored to obtain exit papers for family members. Many, including his sister Fruma, were left behind and perished.

Malkin wrote that he ran with street toughs as a youth. Starting from about age 10, he joined the Haganah, the Jewish guerrilla resistance to British occupation forces in Palestine. Eventually, he gained competence in burgling, lock-picking, and explosives.

During the 1948 war, Malkin helped root out Arab snipers in Jerusalem and later fought with the new nation of Israel’s armed forces. In 1950, he joined the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency. Among his duties were beefing up security at Israel’s embassies abroad, especially detecting the mail bombs so often sent to them. Other missions he was linked with included searching out Nazi rocket scientists working for Arab nations, including Egypt and Libya. One story had him hiding beneath a table to eavesdrop on a meeting of the Arab League.

He once told an interviewer he had been questioned or arrested 40 times on missions abroad, but always managed to talk his way out of trouble. And his abilities as a talker were phenomenal. The editor of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky, said that he once, when editor of the Forward, hosted Malkin for coffee with his staff. Asked a brief question at the outset of the meeting, the ex-spy talked for 2 hours and 45 minutes before anyone could get in the next question.

“I never killed anybody,” Malkin once said. “I helped get information.”

It was Isser Harel, the legendary founder of the Mossad, who sent Malkin on the mission to find Eichmann, where previous agents had failed. After Eichmann was packed off to Israel aboard an El-Al jetliner, Malkin remained silent for decades about his role. The only exception, he wrote, was when his mother lay dying in 1972.

“I knelt beside her bed and took her hand. ‘Mama,’ I whispered. ‘Mama, it’s me Peter. … Mama, Fruma was avenged. It was her brother who captured Adolf Eichmann.’ … Her eyes were open now. ‘Yes,’ she managed in a whisper, ‘I understand.'”

“Eichmann in My Hands” was made into a film that ran on TNT in 1996, “The Man Who Captured Eichmann,” produced by and starring Robert Duvall as Eichmann.

After retiring from the Mossad, Malkin made himself useful to American law enforcement agencies. Mr. Morgenthau said he first met Malkin when he was interrogating Frank Terpil, a rogue CIA agent suspected of selling explosives to terrorists. After Malkin helped verify some of Terpil’s wilder stories, Mr. Morgenthau sponsored Malkin for a green card, and later for citizenship. At one point, Mr. Morgenthau said, he helped sponsor Malkin on a trip to Brazil in search of another fugitive Nazi, Josef Mengele. He also credited Malkin with aiding in the BCCI investigations and with helping smash Israeli drug rings operating in America.

“A lot of the stuff this guy did nobody knows about,” Mr. Morgenthau said. “When I asked him about the Arab League story he just said, “Oh, they shouldn’t have told you about that.'”

One of the most intriguing episodes in “Eichmann in My Hands” concerns a 10-day period that Malkin spent talking with Eichmann at the safe house in Argentina, almost befriending him as he convinced him to sign a statement consenting to being taken to Israel.

Malkin wrote that he asked Eichmann, “My sister had a boy, blond and cheerful as your son, whom I have seen many times during the last days. Why is it that your son walks freely, while my sister’s son can’t?”

Replied Eichmann, “Yes, but he was Jewish, wasn’t he?”

Echoing Hannah Arendt’s subtitle about the banality of evil in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Malkin wrote, “What was I hoping to hear? Even I didn’t know. Maybe a trace of real sorrow? “Afterwards,” I would never again be so unshakable an optimist about humankind. I would face the fact that perfectly normal-seeming individuals, products of conventional homes, can be so emotionally dead as to find themselves beyond the reach of human feeling. It was a powerful revelation, and a desperately sad one.”

Malkin is survived by his wife, Roni, three children, and six grandchildren.