Eli Cohen | Israeli Spy
Cohen grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of Syrian Jewish parents. His fluency in Arabic, English, and French made him an attractive recruit for Israeli intelligence. He travelled to Israel for a brief espionage training course in 1955 and returned to Egypt the following year. Cohen, however, was expelled from Egypt along with other Zionist Jews in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, and he settled in Israel in 1957. He worked as a translator and an accountant before once again being recruited by Israeli intelligence in 1960.
After completing further training, Cohen was sent in 1961 to Buenos Aires, where he posed as an expatriate Syrian businessman. Using the alias Kamal Amin Thaabet, Cohen made numerous contacts in the Syrian expatriate community in Argentina and soon gained the trust of senior officials working in the Syrian embassy there. Those included the Syrian military attaché, Amin al-Hafez, who would later serve as president of Syria. Cohen made his desire to “return” to Syria well known to his new associates, and, when he moved to Damascus in 1962, his Syrian contacts helped him access the highest circles of power in Syria. He soon began to transmit information about Syrian military plans back to Israel.
Cohen’s espionage work took on even greater importance when a BaÊ¿thist junta that included several of his associates from Argentina seized power in Syria in 1963. The coup’s leader, Amin al-Hafez, continued to favour Cohen, and he reportedly considered appointing him deputy minister of defense. Cohen received classified military briefings and was taken on tours of the Syrian fortifications in the Golan Heights.
Despite Cohen’s considerable talent for espionage, he displayed a tendency for carelessness, ignoring his Israeli handlers’ warnings against sending radio transmissions too frequently or always at the same time of day. That proved to be his downfall. In January 1965 Syrian counterintelligence identified his radio signal and apprehended him in the act of sending a transmission. Cohen was interrogated, convicted in a military trial, and publicly hanged in May 1965.
Mossad, (Hebrew: “Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations”), one of the three major intelligence organizations of Israel, along with Aman (military intelligence) and Shin Bet (internal security). The Mossad is concerned with foreign intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and covert operations.
Formally established in December 1949 as the Institute for Co-ordination, the Mossad was the successor to the intelligence arm of the Haganah (the Jewish military force in Palestine during the British mandate period). Reuven Shiloah, who had been involved in special operations and secret diplomacy during the pre-state period, served as the first director. Bureaucratic conflicts hampered the new agency in its early days; it took more than a year for the agency to become operational, and it suffered an early embarrassment in 1951 when an Israeli spy ring in Baghdad was exposed and intelligence officers were arrested.
Shiloah retired in 1952 and was replaced by Isser Harel, who had previously served as the head of Shin Bet. Harel was credited with building the Mossad into a highly professional organization capable of conducting operations around the world during his 11-year tenure (1952–63). One high-profile success, the capture in 1960 of former Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Argentina by a Mossad team and his exfiltration to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, demonstrated the agency’s proficiency and confidence in high-risk operations.
The Mossad maintains numerous Israeli secret agents in Arab and other nations. The most famous of these was Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Syrian government by posing as a Syrian businessman before being discovered and executed in 1965.
The Mossad and its operatives have carried out undercover operations against enemies of Israel and former Nazi war criminals living abroad. Mossad agents tracked down and assassinated the Arab guerrilla leaders responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and the Mossad has also been linked with several assassinations of Palestinian leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
