The spy who saved Israel

ELIYAHU Cohen, an Egyptian Jew, was born in Alexandria in 1924.

As a young adult, he worked within Egypt to secretly assist other Egyptian Jews in emigrating to Israel.

Cohen later became part of an Israeli spy network in the country, which was uncovered and dismantled by Egyptian authorities in 1954.

After arriving in Israel at the end of the 1956 Suez Crisis, Cohen volunteered to join Israel’s military intelligence but was turned away.

Realities

The Spy series picks up after those events, with Cohen now struggling with the bland realities of civilian life.

But in 1960, when facing an increasingly tense border situation with Syria, Israeli intelligence recruited Cohen.

They trained him for more than six months in Israel before sending him off to try to gain acceptance in the Syrian expat community in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under a new alias, Kamal Amin Thabet.

In South America, Cohen, or Thabet, as his Syrian associates would have known him, posed as a wealthy businessman.

He succeeded in gaining the friendship of many influential members of Syria’s community abroad before travelling to Damascus in early 1962 carrying their invaluable letters of introduction.

There, he carried on a high-powered social life, holding parties at his home that were attended by top Syrian officials, who he was able to ply subtly for information.

Those connections enabled Cohen to collect much more than just political gossip.

His new pals invited him to tour Syrian military bases and, as depicted in The Spy, to extensively visit the regime’s fortifications on the Golan Heights, a strategically valuable piece of land that Israeli would later seize in the 1967 Six Day War.

As Cohen burrowed deeper and deeper into Syria’s political and military hierarchy, he would continuously send intelligence updates back to his handlers across the border.

He would do this either by tapping out dispatches in Morse code, or by smuggling documents out through Europe.

In the series, Cohen skillfully establishes himself within the Syrian community in Buenos Aires, eventually meeting Colonel Amin al-Hafez, a high profile Syrian officer put out to pasture in Argentina as Syria’s military attaché

In truth, the real Amin al-Hafez really did befriend Cohen in South America.

Benefits

Later, after Hafez had returned to Syria and toppled the ruling government with a group of Ba’athist conspirators in 1963, Cohen, by that point in Syria, reaped the benefits.

Hafez, who would became Syria’s president, accepted expensive gifts from his apparently wealthy friend, invited him to banquets and even prepared to appoint him as Syria’s Defence Minister.

But all the while he was inadvertently providing the Israeli agent a level of access to the Syrian regime that the Mossad could have only dreamt of.

The Spy shows Cohen growing close to Hafez and a group of Syrian conspirators known as the Ba’ath Party, who were preparing to seize power in the country. This group of radicals would take power in Syria in March 1963.

The Ba’athists were a group of primarily secular Arab nationalists who opposed colonialism and promoted socialism, militarism and Arab unification.

General Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1970 to 2000, was a Ba’athist, as is his son, Bashar al-Asssad, who became president after his father’s death.

And a month before Ba’athists took power in Syria, another group of Ba’athists took over Iraq.

The Iraqi Ba’athists were removed from power within a few months, but they came back in 1968 under their leader Saddam Hussein, who went on to rule the country for decades.

Dangerous

In late 1964, Cohen went home to Israel for leave and a break from his intense professional but dangerous undercover life.

When he returned to Syria, he again began transmitting coded dispatches to Israel, often broadcasting at the same time each day, an error that would make it easy for Syrian counterintelligence to trace his transmitter.

Caught

Likely aided by Soviet radio-detection kit, Syrian soldiers broke into Cohen’s apartment in early 1965 and caught “Thabet” in the middle of a transmission to

his intelligence handlers in Israel.

The Israelis, European governments and even the Pope asked the Syrians to spare Cohen’s life, but to no avail.

He was brutally tortured, then sentenced to death and hanged in Damascus on May 19, 1965.

The Syrians still consider him a traitor even after all these years.

But in Mossad circles and to Israeli hardliners, Cohen will always be a true hero.

The Spy LIKENESS: The real Eli Cohen ( right) and Sacha Baron Cohen playing him in FEW spy agencies inspire the level of intrigue that Israel’s Mossad does. And among its agents there are few, if any, that have achieved the status of Eli Cohen. In the mid-1960s, he posed as a wealthy Arab businessman for years in order to infiltrate the highest levels of the Syrian regime and send invaluable intelligence back to his Israeli handlers. Cohen’s story was recounted in The Spy, the six-episode Netflix mini-series. It starred comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen, known for his roles in Borat and the Showtime series he created, Who is America? The Spy depicts Eli Cohen’s transformation from office clerk to Mossad operative to Syrian power player. It is a daring tale of espionage that plays more like something out of a James Bond thriller than a history book. The remarkable part, of course, is that it really happened. Here’s the true story behind The Spy.

The Spy DEADLY GAME: Eli Cohen and his wife enjoy the high life, as depicted in series