Glamour stakes

You call Sylvia Rafael “Mossad’s most glamorous spy” ( August 19) but there were at least two others to rival her in the glamour and bravery stakes. a Second World War network of agents in Egypt, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In January 1948, she passed to Ben Gurion secret Egyptian and Syrian plans to invade newly established Israel. She had sewn the papers into her shoulder-pads.

a spy in Lebanon for 14 years, infiltrating the highest echelons of society, and smuggling persecuted Jews out of Syria. A mother of seven, she was caught, tried, jailed and severely tortured, but released in a 1967 PoW exchange. She is now 96. Lyn Julius Harif-UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, London SW5