The first time I heard of the spy Eli Cohen was when I was in school. During a class trip to the Golan Heights, the guide pointed to the tall eucalyptus trees growing between the structures of an abandoned Syrian post and told us about "our man in Damascus."
"When Eli, who was operating over the border as the Arab businessman Kamel Amin Thaabet, he and his friends visited the Golan, which was then in Syrian hands, and noticed that the Syrian soldiers on duty were exposed to the burning sun," the guide said.
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"He suggested to the commanders that they plant eucalyptus trees, supposedly to provide shade for the soldiers and make things easier for them, but actually the proposal served the Israeli Air Force: In the Six-Day War, our pilots could identify the eucalyptus trees from above and be certain that an enemy base was underneath them," he said.
I remember that the story impressed me and my classmates. The resourcefulness attributed to Eli Cohen couldn't not enthrall us. Years later, I pondered over the eucalyptus story, and began to suspect that it was nothing more than a nice tale.
Itai Landsberg, the chief editor of the new documentary series about Cohen, which aired its first episode on public broadcaster Kan 11, says that despite the focus on the famous story, he has not been able to confirm the story. No mention of the eucalyptus trick was found in the many telegrams Cohen sent from Damascus, and his family never mentioned anything like it.
But even without the eucalyptus, Cohen's achievements during his years of secret service in Damascus are better than any fiction.
"Eli Cohen's actions saved Israel many battalions of soldiers, and the information he brought in before the Six-Day War was worth its weight in gold and led to the great victory in the Six-Day War," former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said.
Landsberg says that over the past two years, various and sundry reports about the Eli Cohen case reached him. "The more I delved into it, the more I realized that there was a place for a serious investigative piece about elements [of the story] that still hadn't been exposed."
According to Landsberg, the Cohen affair – which ended with him being hanged in the Marjeh Square in the middle of Damascus – is "so complicated and multi-dimensional that it would be wrong to dismiss it with a brief summation. Working on it, we discovered more and more things. The investigation split and took directions that led it all over the world, including Arab countries, Germany, and the US. We found a lot of details and located a number of people who had been involved. The series that investigation led to produces, for the first time, the full extent of Eli Cohen's activities in Syria and the possible reasons why he was captured."
The three-episode series, which Landsberg created with Liora Amir-Bermetz, Eyal Tavor, and Gil Isakov, attempt to tell the story of the Israeli spy from his own point of view.
"For the first time, we are presenting the Syrian records of the trial, some in Arabic, and some translated into Hebrew, as we found them years later in the IDF archives," Landsberg said.
"Comparing them, and comparing them to what various individuals involved – like the Syrian judge who presided over the court that tried Cohen – wrote about the affair, offers a first-ever opportunity to hear Eli's own version of the story as he himself told it in court," Landsberg said.
"So we have the privilege of hearing how he prepared his cover story in Argentina, how he entered Damascus via Beirut, who took him across the border, how he made his first contacts with the most senior people in Damascus, how in the space of 10 days he got close to the head of the Syrian army, and how he started to host parties and social events with the heads of the Baath party and collect information from people who were very close to the regime. These descriptions, which Eli Cohen gave at his trial, might have been for the history books, or possibly for his family."
The fear in the Syrians' eyes
Cohen, who was Agent 566 – the Hebrew title of the series – was a phenomenal success. Jacques Mercier, the French lawyer whom Israel asked to work on behalf of Cohen in Syria after he was captured, appears in the series and speaks with wonder about what the Israeli spy managed to accomplish.
"Eli Cohen's position in Syria was like that of a TV camera pointed at events. He was friends with influential members of the Baath party, he was a close friend of President Amin al-Hafez, whom he had met in Argentina," Mercier said.
Everything that "human camera" caught – and he caught plenty – was transferred in code to his base in Israel.
Among other things, Cohen revealed the Syrians' intentions to divert the water sources of the Jordan River to leave Israel without a freshwater source. In those days, that would have been a true existential threat. Cohen met with Mohammed Bin Laden (the father of Osama Bin Laden), the owner of a large building concern who had been hired to execute the project, who told him about the plan. The information Cohen collected enabled Israel to attack and stop the project.
Thanks to Cohen's friendship with Adnan al-Jabri, a MIG-17 pilot, Cohen secured shocking information that indicated the state of the Syrian military's morale.
"Every time the Syrian pilots have to take off for a mission where there is a chance they'll encounter Israeli pilots, they find every possible excuse not to go up," the pilot told him. Information like that, from the belly of the Syrian military establishment, could not have been extracted by any electronic means. Only Cohen could have supplied it to his superiors in Israel.
Suspicious meetings
The list of intelligence coups, impressive as it might be, is not enough to understand what Cohen was feeling during his years of activity in an enemy country. In the new series, the creators try to imagine what a man who was operating out of an immense sense of devotion, under a borrowed identity and almost entirely cut off from his wife and young children, was going through.
Although during his trial, Cohen said that only financial need had tempted him to turn spy for Israel, people who knew him and Mossad officials who were interviewed for the series say differently. Cohen joined the Mossad to make a contribution, although the series also presents evidence that the Mossad had him fired from his job as a bookkeeper to pressure him to enlist.
There is something else that all the Jews from Arab countries, who placed their abilities at the disposal of the Jewish state and were deployed to Arab lands, appear to have had in common. They all made aliyah after the state was established and felt that, unlike the more veteran Israelis, they had missed the key struggles in the battle to bring the Zionist dream to fruition. To make up for what they had missed, they were ready to take on any mission, no matter how dangerous, for the sake of the nation.
Naturally, all these elements: patriotism; missing the family; the constant danger, increased with time. One of the most moving points of the series tells of Cohen's visits to the Syrian posts in the Golan Heights, of which there were five. He stood, looking out over the Sea of Galilee, toward Israel.
"When I saw Tiberias and the kibbutzim of the Jordan Valley, I was seized by a desire to run," he would later say. "I wanted to take a boat and flee. Then I felt that I was a kind of lighthouse guiding the ship of Israel through the strait."
His sense of mission strengthened as his reports were found increasingly effective, and it could have led him to become less cautious. Is that what finally brought him down? The generally accepted version of events ascribes his capture to his having sent too many telegrams, despite having been instructed to send no more than one a day.
According to that version, after the Syrians picked up on coded messages that they could not decipher, they sought help from the Soviet Union. A special trailer equipped with advanced Soviet spy technology is what drew the suspicion on to the "businessman" Kamel Amin Thaabet.
But according to the series, the real story is much more complicated.
"There were at least two investigative committees into the Eli Cohen affair," Landsberg claims. "But the public never officially heard their findings. Moreover, the Mossad's Eli Cohen file still hasn't been opened, not even for his family."
Lacking complete official information, various other ideas have been floated, most of which are raised explicitly or implicitly in the series.
Landsberg brings up a few facts that could have aroused the suspicion of Syrian intelligence: "In the past few years the CIA archives have been revealed, and they contain documents showing Eli Cohen's ties to various people, which later turned out to have worked for foreign spy agencies like the German BND and also the CIA, or Syrian intelligence, for example. Some of these agents were capture by Syria, and the fact that they visited Kamel Amin Thaabet's home, made him the target of suspicion too."
If Cohen met with Nazi criminal Franz Rademacher, who had sought refuge in Syria and worked with a number of western intelligence agencies, and was also an informant for the Syrian intelligence services, that would have endangered Cohen. Abraham Cohen, Eli's brother, who has been researching the affair for a few decades, has made some interesting findings and reached out to the family of an individual who was in contact with Eli in Damascus and was hung three months before Cohen. They lived in the same building, and their connection could have been suspicious to Syrian intelligence officers.
A mole in the Mossad?
If that wasn't enough, Landsberg says there were other weak links that could have led to Cohen's capture.
"In a film I made years ago for Channel 1, I exposed the story of Masoud Buton, who was an Israeli agent in Lebanon and Syria before Cohen. Buton claimed he was the one who prepared the documentation for Kamel Amin Thaabet, and after he was recalled to Israel, he warned them not to use that name under any circumstances because his sudden disappearance from Syria had "burned" the name. The Mossad denied the story, and Buton even sued Meir Amit, who was head of Military Intelligence and later head of the Mossad, to prove he was telling the truth."
Even Kamel Amin Thaabet's behavior could have sparked suspicion among his acquaintances. In accordance with his cover story, he was a wealthy, successful businessman, but for a period of time, his friends didn't know what exactly his line of business was. According to the series, people who visited his apartment noticed modest furniture which didn't fit his social status or his supposed wealth.
"There was also an instance of a secret report he sent to Israel being broadcast on Israel Radio. That caused the Syrians to think that an Israeli agent was operating among them and start working to find out who it was," Landsberg says.
After the affair came to light, the head of Syrian army intelligence said he had issued orders to have Kamel Amin Thaabet followed a full year before he was captured, but there is no way of knowing if that is true, or if it was just a case of hindsight. After all, the Syrians had plenty of reasons not to present the truth. The Arab world laughed at them over how deeply an Israeli agent had managed to penetrate their country.
This begs the question of whether Cohen's activity could have been stopped before the Syrians closed in on him. His family, and some of the interviewees in the series, are certain that the last time Cohen visited Israel, his handlers in the Mossad should have stopped him from going back to Syria.
The third episode of the series floats an even more serious allegation against the Mossad – that it had a mole. And this mole might have been the one who revealed Kamel Amin Thaabet's true identity. The allegation rests on circumstantial findings, such as a statement that, in a single month, three Israeli agents in Arab countries (Cohen, Wolfgang Lutz, who was working in Egypt, and a third agent whose name has never been released) were caught.
The records of Cohen's trial raise the supposition that one of Cohen's telegrams to Israel found its way to the Syrian intelligence establishment. Is that enough to determine that information was intentionally leaked from the Israeli intelligence community? I think not.
Lt. Col. (res.) Gideon Mitchnick, formerly head of the history and legacy division in the IDF's Military Intelligence, tells Israel Hayom that it would be incorrect to try and pin down the exact reason for Cohen's capture.
"As someone who has learned in Military Intelligence to be cautious and to doubt, I think that anyone who tries to state exactly how Cohen fell, without leaving any room for doubt, is a charlatan. It's important to research and focus on the affair, certainly in the school system, but the attempt to point to one person who is absolutely responsible is wrong," Mitchnick says.
Mitchnick points out plenty of facts that demonstrate that the system took care of its secret fighters and saw them as more than information-collecting tools. After Cohen reported his meeting with Rademacher, he was instructed to leave the matter alone, possibly to protect him.
At the start of 1965, Isabel Pedro, another agent who had been operational in Egypt for three years, asked to leave her job, possibly in light of Lutz and Cohen's capture. She was immediately allowed to.
"I haven't found evidence that they tried to get her to stay against her will," Mitchnick says. "In general, I've talked to a lot of people who worked closely with then-Mossad head Meir Amit, and they indicated that his basic approach, his special personality, did not fit the narrative of abandonment. I know that Meir Amit took Cohen's exposure very hard. As a result, processes were analyzed and lessons were learned, including the need for special caution when handling Israeli secret agents," Mitchnick says.
Either way, the bitterness of Cohen's family comprise the central motif of the series, even 55 years after the tragic ending of the affair. It would be sad and unjust if that motif overshadowed the memory of the affair. We cannot know if we will ever discover with certainty how the Syrians caught Eli Cohen. Even if that happens, the reason for his downfall must never eclipse his heroism.
