ZVI Malchin was not only the single greatest secret agent the state of Israel was lucky enough to produce, he was one of the most extraordinary people one could ever hope to meet.

The world knew him as Peter Z. Malkin, the man who on a cold night in 1960 kidnapped a factory worker named Riccardo Klement outside his ramshackle Buenos Aires home and brought him to Israel – – where he stood public trial as Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who saw to it that 6 million Jews were murdered efficiently.

Yet that was just one of hundreds of exploits undertaken by Malchin – who died here Tuesday night at age 75 – during more than a quarter-century with Israeli intelligence, first as an agent and, ultimately, as chief of operations.

Even today, nearly 30 years after his retirement, many of Malchin’s most spectacular achievements remain hidden behind the veil of official Israeli censorship. But enough of what he did is publicly known to leave you in awe that one man could have accomplished so much.

Malchin unmasked Israel Be’er, one of the top aides to then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, as a Soviet spy. He bugged a meeting of Arab League heads of states. He uncovered former Nazi scientists who had gone to work for Egypt in the 1950s. He battled Palestinian terrorism in Beirut.

Even in retirement, he outdid active agents.

During the ’70s, he went to Brazil in search of Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor of Auschwitz. While there, he uncovered a Soviet agent who was bribing Brazilian army officers and buying U.S. Army materiel.

“He asked me to notify the CIA,” recalled Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, who frequently used Malchin as a freelance investigator. “I said he didn’t have enough evidence. So he went back and did a black-bag job on the guy – came up with his passport and his visa.

“I called Stanley Sporkin, then general counsel of the CIA. Within hours, the agency had sent people to New York to take the evidence. ‘We know all about this guy,’ Sporkin told me. ‘We just had no idea where the hell he was.’ ”

How did Malchin know? “After all these years,” he told Morgenthau, “I can smell them.”

His career alone was exceptional enough. But Zvika, as he was known to his friends, was not some Hollywood stereotype of a secret agent.

Malchin was an artist, whose stunning paintings – including a series of sketches done while he was interrogating Eichmann in Argentina – in recent years have been exhibited in leading museums around the world. (He divided his time between Israel, Florida and New York – he kept a studio here on the Lower East Side and lived in the East 30s.)

“Was being a painter my cover story for the Mossad, or was being in the Mossad my cover story for being a painter? Sometimes, I’m not sure, he joked.” (His art can be seen as peterzmalkin.com.)

Malchin was a poet – an irrepressibly funny and always eloquent observer of the human condition. He enthralled audiences around the world as a lecturer; they all wanted to hear how he’d captured Eichmann, but he had much more to say to them.

It’s wrong, he would say, to call Eichmann a monster. After all, “a monster can be excused for his behavior. A human being, though – how does a human being become a beast who can kill children, women, the elderly? The problem is not how a monster could do it, but how a human being did it.”

“He was a brilliant analyst,” said Morgenthau. “For him, information was always much more important than action.” No doubt, that’s what attracted early Israeli leaders to Malchin – by age 13, he’d been recruited into the pre-statehood Haganah underground.

And though he saw more than his share of genuine dramatic action, Zvika had little regard for popular fiction’s idea of a spy. “In 28 years, I never killed anyone,” he said. “My most important weapon wasn’t a gun – it was my brain.”

That, and his engaging, larger than life, personality – which allowed him to talk his way out of some 40 arrests or detentions during his career.

Though he loved being acclaimed for his achievements, he didn’t go seeking glory. He was a curious mixture of humility and pride who never demanded recognition, but was always happy to receive it.

You couldn’t help being hopelessly charmed by such a man; everyone who met him wanted to spend more time with him. His friends, and I was lucky to count myself as one for more than 25 years, were fiercely loyal.

Last night, many of those friends gathered at the Park East Synagogue to say goodbye to a man who was literally a legend in his lifetime.

Today, he is headed on his final journey back to Israel, the country and people he served so well.