Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

“I asked myself a hundred times: can Eli do what I want? I always showed him, of course, my confidence was always in place. I never wanted him for a moment to think he would always be one step from the trapdoor which would send him to kingdom come. Yet some of the very best brains in Mossad put everything they knew into him. Finally I decided to run with Eli.”

Meir Amit spent weeks creating a cover story for his protégé. They would sit together, studying street maps and photographs of Buenos Aires so that Cohen’s new background and name, Kamil Amin Taabes, became totally familiar. The Mossad chief saw how quickly

“Eli learned the language of an exporter-importer to Syria. He memorized the difference between waybills and freight certificates, contracts and guarantees, everything he would need to know. He was like a chameleon, absorbing everything. Before my very eye, Eli Cohen faded and Taabes took over, the Syrian who had never given up a longing to go home to Damascus. Every day Eli became more confident, more certain and keen to prove he could carry off the role. He was like a world champion marathon runner, trained to peak at the start of the race. But he could be running his for years. We had done all we could to show him how to pace his new life, to live the life. The rest was up to him. We all knew that. There was no big good-bye or send-off. He just slipped out of Israel, the way all my spies went.”

In the Syrian capital, Cohen quickly established himself in the business community and developed a circle of high-level friends. These included Maazi Zahreddin, nephew of Syria’s president.

Zahreddin was a boastful man, eager to show how invincible Syria was. Cohen played to that. In no time he was being given a guided tour of Syria’s Golan Heights fortifications. He saw the deep concrete bunkers housing the long-range artillery sent by Russia. He was even permitted to take photographs. Within hours of two hundred T-54 Russian tanks arriving in Syria, Cohen had informed Tel Aviv. He even obtained a complete blueprint of Syria’s strategy to cut off northern Israel. The information was priceless.

While Cohen continued to confirm Meir Amit’s belief that one field agent was worth a division of soldiers, he eventually began to become reckless. Cohen had always been a soccer fan. The day after a visiting team beat Israel in Tel Aviv, he broke the strict “Business only” rule about transmissions. He radioed his operator: “It is about time we learned to be victorious on the soccer field.”

Other unauthorized messages were translated: “Please send my wife an anniversary greeting,” or “Happy Birthday to my daughter.”

Meir Amit was privately furious. But he understood enough of the pressures on the agent to hope Cohen’s behavior was “no more than a temporary aberration often found in the best of agents. I tried to get inside his head. Was he desperate and this his way of showing it by dropping his guard? I tried to think like him, knowing I’d rewritten his life. I had to try and weigh a hundred factors. But in the end the only important one was: could Eli still do his job?”

Meir Amit decided that Cohen could.

On a January night in 1965, Eli Cohen waited in his Damascus bedroom ready to transmit. As he tuned his receiver to go, Syrian intelligence officers burst into the apartment. Cohen had been caught by one of the most advanced mobile detection units in the world—supplied by the Russians.

Under interrogation he was forced to send a message to Mossad. The Syrians failed to notice the subtle change of speed and rhythm in the radio transmission. In Tel Aviv, Meir Amit received news Eli had been captured. Two days later, Syria confirmed his capture.

“It was like losing one of your family. You ask yourself the questions you always ask when an agent is lost: Could we have saved him? How was he betrayed? By his own carelessness? By someone close to him? Was he burned-out and we didn’t realize it? Did he have some kind of death wish? That, too, happens. Or was it just bad luck? You ask, and go on asking. You never get the answer for certain. But asking can be a way to cope.”

At no stage did the Syrians succeed in breaking Eli Cohen—despite the torture he endured before being sentenced to death.

Meir Amit devoted almost all his time trying to save Eli Cohen. While Nadia Cohen launched a worldwide publicity campaign for her husband’s life—she approached the pope, the Queen of England, prime ministers, and presidents—Amit worked more secretly. He traveled to Europe to see the heads of French and German intelligence. They could do nothing. He made informal approaches to the Soviet Union. He fought on right until, on May 18, 1965, shortly after 2:00 A.M., a convoy drove out of El Maza Prison in Damascus. In one of the trucks was Eli Cohen.

With him was the eighty-year-old chief rabbi of Syria, Nissim Andabo. Overcome by what was to happen, the rabbi wept openly. Eli Cohen calmed the old man. The convoy reached El Marga Square in the center of Damascus. There Eli recited the Vidui, the Hebrew prayer of a man about to face death: “Almighty God forgive me for all my sins and transgressions.”

At 3:35 A.M., watched by thousands of Syrians and in the full glare of television lights, Eli stood on the gallows.

In Tel Aviv, Nadia Cohen watched her husband die and tried to kill herself. She was taken to a hospital and her life was saved.

Next day, in a small private ceremony in his office, Meir Amit paid tribute to Eli Cohen. Then he went back to the business of running his second prized agent.

Wolfgang Lotz, a German Jew, had arrived in Palestine shortly after Hitler came to power. In 1963 Meir Amit had selected him from a shortlist of candidates for a spying mission to Egypt. While Lotz underwent the same rigorous training as Cohen, once more, Meir Amit thought carefully about his agent’s cover. Amit decided to make him a riding instructor, an East German refugee who had served in the Afrika Korps in World War II and had returned to Egypt to open an equestrian academy. The job would readily give him access to Cairo’s high society, which was built around the city’s riding fraternity.

Soon Lotz had developed a circle of clients that included the deputy head of Egyptian military intelligence and the chief of security for the Suez Canal zone. Emulating Cohen, Lotz persuaded his newfound friends to show off Egypt’s formidable defenses: its rocket launchpads in Sinai and on the Negev frontier. Lotz also obtained a complete list of Nazi scientists living in Cairo who were working in Egypt’s rocket and arms programs. Soon they were systematically executed by Mossad agents.

After two years under cover, Lotz was finally arrested and convicted. The Egyptians, sensing he was too valuable to kill, kept him alive in anticipation he could be traded for Egyptian soldiers captured in a future war with Israel. Once again, Meir Amit was deeply concerned over Lotz’s capture.

Meir Amit wrote to Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, asking him to exchange Lotz and his wife in return for Egyptian POWs Israel had captured. Nasser refused. Amit applied psychological pressure.

“I let the Egyptian prisoners know they were all being held because Nasser refused to hand over two Israelis. We allowed them to write home. Their letters made their feelings very clear.”

Meir Amit wrote to Nasser again saying Israel would publicly give him all the credit for recovering his POWs and would keep quiet about the return of Lotz and his wife. Nasser still did not agree. So Amit took the matter to the United Nations commander responsible for keeping the peace in the Sinai. The officer flew to Cairo and obtained the assurance that Lotz and his wife would be set free “at some future date.”

Meir Amit “understood the coded language. A month later Lotz and his wife left Cairo in complete secrecy for Geneva. A few hours later they were back in my office.”