Seif, like El-Ard, had no clue about Elie Cohen’s real identity. He, too, believed Tabet was a fanatical nationalist who had his own political agenda.
Elie Cohen realized that he had become the loneliest spy in the world—with not even one friend and confidant; he didn’t know if there was another Israeli network operating in Damascus. He needed nerves of steel to withstand the stress of his terrible solitude, and to play a dangerous role twenty-four hours a day. He knew that even during his rare visits home he couldn’t share his secret with his wife, and had to mislead her, too.
He started transmitting his messages to Israel daily, at eight A.M.—and sometimes in the evening as well. His broadcasts were carried out under a foolproof cover. His transmitter was located in his villa, very close to the army headquarters, which was the source of endless transmissions. Nobody could discern the difference between Elie’s broadcasts and the myriad messages emanating from the army communications center.
Six months after arriving in Syria, Kamal Amin Tabet had become a well-known figure in Damascus high society. He then decided to go abroad “for business.” He first flew to Argentina, where he met several of his Arab friends, then traveled to Europe, changed planes and identities, and, on a hot summer night, landed in Lod Airport. Laden with presents, the “traveling salesman” arrived in his modest apartment in Bat Yam, where Nadia and Sophie were waiting for him.
At the end of fall, Elie Cohen flew to Europe. A few days later, Kamal Amin Tabet arrived in Damascus. During his stay in Israel, his superiors in Aman had equipped him with a miniature camera so he could photograph sites and documents. He had to conceal the microfilms in expensive boxes containing backgammon pieces. The boxes were made of polished wood embellished with a mosaic of nacre and ivory. The mosaic ornament could be dug out of the polished wood, and reinserted after the microfilm had been placed in the cavity. Tabet would send the backgammon sets to “friends in Argentina,” who would dispatch them to Israel with the diplomatic pouch.
Some of the first documents sent by Elie were reports on the growing unrest in the army and the rising power of the Ba’ath (Resurrection) Socialist Party. Elie felt a profound change of mood in Syria, and let his intuition guide him. He established close contacts with the Ba’ath leaders and contributed large sums of money to the party.
He had done the right thing. On March 8, 1963, a new coup shook Damascus. The army deposed the government and the Ba’ath Party seized power in Syria. General Hafez, Elie’s friend from Buenos Aires, was appointed minister of defense in Salah Al-Bitar’s cabinet. In July a new coup took place, this time inside the regime. Hafez became president of the Revolutionary Council and head of state. Tabet’s best friends were appointed to key positions in the cabinet and the military hierarchy. The Israeli spy was now a member of the inner circle of power.
A glamorous party in Damascus. One after the other, the luxury cars of ministers and generals arrive at the sprawling villa. A long line of guests in evening attire and resplendent uniforms proceeds into the house, where the host is warmly welcoming his guests. The guest list reads like a Who’s Who in Damascus: several ministers, including the minister of defense and the minister for agrarian reform, a large number of generals and colonels, the top leaders of the Ba’ath Party, businessmen, and tycoons. Many of them are standing around Colonel Salim Hatum, the officer who led his tanks into Damascus on the night of the coup and actually handed General Hafez the presidency. President Hafez himself arrives later and warmly shakes the hand of the host, his friend Kamal Amin Tabet. He is accompanied by Mrs. Hafez, stunning in the mink coat presented to her by Tabet as a token of the Syrian emigrants’ admiration for the president and his wife. She is not the only one to have received expensive gifts. Quite a few women wear the jewelry, and senior officials drive the cars, given them by Tabet. Important political dealers have deposited his money into their accounts.
In the living room, a group of officials and army officers, back from the Israel border, discuss the military situation; they are joined by entrepreneurs and engineers who work on the ambitious project of diverting the tributaries of the Jordan River. In the spacious hall, the directors of the government-sponsored Radio Damascus and the heads of the Ministry of Propaganda stand together. Tabet is one of them now—the government has asked him to run some radio broadcasts to emigrant communities overseas. Tabet has another radio show, where he analyzes political and economic issues.
That party, as many others, costs Tabet a fortune, but he doesn’t even blink. He has reached the apex of success, and it seems that there is no door he can’t open. He has good friends in the army headquarters, and he regularly participates in policy-making meetings of the Ba’ath Party.
Elie kept transmitting reports of military character, names and functions of senior officers, top-secret military orders, and other items to Israel. He photographed and dispatched military maps, mostly the detailed blueprints of the fortifications along the Israeli border, to Aman. He sent reports on new weapons introduced in the Syrian Army. He also described the Syrians’ capacity to absorb new weapons. Months later, a Syrian general bitterly admitted: “There was no army secret that remained unknown to Elie Cohen . . .”
Elie transmitted every morning to Israel and didn’t fear capture, thanks to the protective umbrella of the Syrian Army broadcasts from the nearby headquarters. But once, a friend, the army lieutenant Zaher Al-Din, paid him a surprise visit. Elie succeeded in hiding the transmitter, but a sheaf of papers with the secret code, in the form of grids filled with letters, remained on the table.
“What’s this?” Zaher wanted to know.
“Oh, just crosswords,” Elie said.
Besides the transmissions and the backgammon boxes for his “Argentinean friends,” Elie developed a third way of communicating with Israel: Radio Damascus. He worked out with his superiors in Tel Aviv a code of words and phrases, which he inserted into his radio broadcasts and which were duly decoded by Aman.
He now took another step in his efforts to obtain top-secret information. A rumor started running in the governing circles in Damascus that Tabet held illicit sex parties in his villa. Only his close, intimate friends were invited to these parties, where the guests met a large number of pretty women. Some of them were street hookers; others, girls from good families. Tabet’s guests enjoyed wild sex, but their host was the only one who did not lose his cool.
Tabet also supplied sexy—and generous—secretaries to his high-placed friends. One of these friends was Colonel Salim Hatum, whose mistress passed to Tabet every word she heard from her colonel.
Tabet showed extreme patriotic fervor when he spoke about Israel, which he defined as “the vilest enemy of Arab nationalism.” He urged the leaders of Syria to increase their anti-Israeli propaganda and open a “second front” against Israel, besides Egypt. He even accused his friends of not doing enough against the Israeli aggressor. In doing so, he achieved his goal. His military friends were determined to prove him wrong, and to show him they were ready for battle with the enemy. On three occasions they took him to visit the Syrian positions along Israel’s border. They let him see the fortifications and the bunkers, showed him the weapons concentrated in the area and described their defensive and offensive plans. Lieutenant Zaher Al-Din took him to the El-Hama military camp, where large quantities of new weapons had been stored. On his fourth visit to the Israeli border, Tabet was the only civilian in a group of Syrian and Egyptian high-ranking officers. The group was headed by the most respected Arab military leader, the Egyptian general Ali Amer, head of the United Arab Commandment, who commanded—at least on paper—the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.
Right after Amer’s visit, the Ba’ath leaders charged Tabet with a vital assignment: he was sent on a mission of reconciliation to the elderly Ba’ath leader Salah Al-Bitar, who had been deposed by General Hafez, and was since “on a cure” in Jericho. Tabet traveled to Jordan and spent a few days with the former prime minister. Back
in Damascus, Tabet accompanied to the airport the ailing President Hafez, who was on his way to get medical treatment in Paris. When Hafez returned a few weeks later, Tabet was once again in the welcoming line, waiting on the tarmac, his mission successfully completed.
In 1963, an important change took place in Israel. The new ramsad who replaced Little Isser, Meir Amit, had been for a few months in charge of both Aman and the Mossad. Amit decided to abolish Unit 131 and transfer all its men and operations to the Mossad. One morning, Elie Cohen learned that his employer had changed, and he was now a Mossad agent.
That same year, Nadia gave birth to a second daughter, Iris. But in November 1964, during his second visit to Israel that same year, Elie saw his secret dream come true: Nadia had a third child, a son! He was named Shaul.
“During that visit we noticed that Elie had changed,” his family members said later. “He was withdrawn, nervous, and grim. He lost his temper several times. He didn’t want to go out, didn’t want to meet friends. ‘Soon I’ll quit my job,’ he said to us. ‘Next year I’ll come back to Israel. I won’t leave my family anymore.’ ”
At the end of November, Elie kissed his wife and three children good-bye and flew away again. Nadia didn’t know that this was the last good-bye.
November 13, 1964, was a Wednesday. Syrian positions at the Israeli border, close to Tel-Dan, opened fire on Israeli tractors that were working in the demilitarized zone. The Israeli reaction was formidable. Tanks and cannon riposted with heavy fire, and minutes later Mirage and Vautour aircraft joined the battle. The aircraft pounded the Syrian positions, then dived toward the site of the deviation of the Jordan waters and blasted the canals dug by the Syrians. Heavy mechanical equipment, bulldozers, tractors, and shovels were systematically destroyed. The Syrian Air Force didn’t interfere, as it had not yet mastered its newly acquired Soviet MiG fighters.
The world press almost unanimously validated the Israeli response to the Syrian aggression. Months later, Syrian officers would say that one of the Israeli attack’s architects had been Elie Cohen, who was in Israel during the battle. Thanks to Cohen, the Israelis were fully aware of the poor state of the Syrian Air Force and its inability to go to battle at that stage. The Israelis also had detailed knowledge of the Syrian fortifications and the water deviation works. They knew exactly what kinds and quantities of weapons were positioned in each base and bunker.
But Elie Cohen knew much more than that. He had succeeded in befriending a Saudi entrepreneur who had been contracted to plan and dig the first canals of the Syrian project. Thanks to that friendship, the Israelis learned, months in advance, where the excavations would take place, how deep and wide the canals would be, what equipment would be used, and other technical details. The contractor also divulged to his friend Tabet the capacity of the canals to withstand bombing from the air and the full extent of the security measures. The name of Cohen’s good friend was bin Laden, little Osama’s father. Thanks to the detailed information he shared with the Israeli spy, Israel attacked the project several times, until the Arab countries decided to abandon it completely in 1965.
In mid-January 1965, a few weeks after Elie had left Israel, a beautiful postcard landed in Nadia Cohen’s mailbox. “My dearest Nadia,” Elie wrote in French. “Just a few lines to wish you a Happy New Year, which I hope will bring happiness to the whole family. Lots of kisses to my darlings—Fifi (Sophie), Iris, and Shaikeh’ (Shaul), and to you, from the bottom of my heart—Elie.”
When Nadia received that postcard, Elie was lying, beaten and tortured, on the rough stone floor of a Damascus prison.
For several months already, the Syrian Mukhabarat—the secret services—were on high alert. The alarm had been sounded by Chief Tayara, head of the Palestinian Department of the Mukhabarat. Tayara noticed that since the summer of 1964, almost every decision taken by the Syrian government in the evening—or even during the night—was broadcast the following day in the Arabic-language programs of Kol Israel—Israel’s government-sponsored radio. Furthermore, Israel had made public some top-secret decisions that had been taken behind closed doors. Tayara was stunned by the precision of the Israeli bombings during the November 13 incident. His logical conclusion was that the Israelis had exact knowledge of the Syrian Army deployment at the front lines, and knew precisely where to hit and how. He became certain that Israel had a spy at the highest levels of the Syrian government. The spy’s information was broadcasted by Kol Israel in a matter of hours. This meant he was transmitting his reports by wireless. But where was the transmitter?
In the fall of 1964, Tayara and his colleagues made great efforts to locate the secret transmitter with Soviet-made equipment, but failed.
And then, in January 1965, they got lucky.
A Soviet ship unloaded in Latakiyeh port several huge containers filled with new communications equipment. It was to replace the Syrian Army’s obsolete instruments. The equipment upgrade took place on January 7, 1965. In order to put in place the new devices and check them out, all army communications were suspended for twenty-four hours.
When silence fell over all army communications throughout the country, an officer on duty by an army receiver discerned a single, faint transmission. The spy’s broadcast. The officer reached for the telephone.
Mukhabarat’s squads, equipped with Soviet locators, set out at once to find the transmission source. Unfortunately, the transmission stopped before they reached the place. But the technician’s feverish calculations pointed in one direction: the home of Kamal Amin Tabet.
“That’s a mistake,” a senior Mukhabarat officer ruled. It was unthinkable that Tabet, whom the Ba’ath leaders wanted to appoint minister in the next cabinet, could be a spy. Tabet was above suspicion.
But in the evening, the transmission was there again. The Mukhabarat again sent its cars, and again got the same result.
At eight A.M. precisely, on a sunny January day, four Mukhabarat officers broke into the splendid house in the Abu Ramen neighborhood. They smashed the entrance door, tearing it from its hinges, and then darted toward the bedroom, guns in hands. The spy was there, but he was not sleeping. He was caught red-handed, in the middle of a transmission. He jumped on his feet and faced the officers; he didn’t try to run away and didn’t resist his captors. For once, the odds were against him. “Kamal Amin Tabet,” thundered the commanding officer. “You are under arrest!”
The news spread through Damascus like wildfire. Fantastic, absurd, impossible, nonsense! There were no words to express the shock and the disbelief of Syria’s leaders when they heard the news. Could one of the leaders of the ruling party, a personal friend of the president, a millionaire and a socialite, be a spy?!
But the evidence was irrefutable. The transmitter that Tabet would conceal behind the window shutters, the tiny reserve transmitter hidden in the large chandelier in the living room, the microfilms, the dynamite-stuffed cigars, the code pages . . . The man was a traitor indeed.
Panic-stricken, the heads of the regime ordered a thorough investigation. What exactly did Tabet know? Could he incriminate them? President Hafez himself came to interrogate him in his cell. “During the interrogation,” Hafez later testified, “when I looked in Tabet’s eyes, I was suddenly assailed by a terrible suspicion. I felt that the man before me wasn’t an Arab at all. Very cautiously I asked him a few questions about the Muslim religion, about the Koran. I asked him to recite the Sura Al-Fatiha—the first chapter of the Koran. Tabet could barely quote a few verses. He tried to defend himself by saying that he had left Syria while still very young, and his memory was betraying him. But at this moment I knew: he was a Jew.”
Damascus’s torturers did the rest. While Tabet was still lying in his dark cell, unconscious, his face and body covered with ugly wounds, his nails pulled out, his confession was rushed to General Hafez. The man was not Tabet. He was Elie Cohen, an Israeli Jew.
On January 24, 1965, Damascus officially announced “the arrest of an important Israeli sp
y.” A senior officer, livid with rage, roared at a press conference: “Israel is the devil, and Cohen is the devil’s agent!”
Panic spread throughout Damascus. Was Cohen a lone wolf or the head of a spy ring? One after the other, sixty-nine people were arrested; twenty-seven of them women. Among the suspects were Majeed Sheikh El-Ard, George Salem Seif, Lieutenant Zaher Al-Din, senior officials of the Ministry of Propaganda, prostitutes, and other women whose identities were not revealed. Four hundred people who had been in contact with Tabet were questioned. The investigation exposed some serious problems. Many of Syria’s political, military, and business leaders were among Cohen’s closest friends. The investigators couldn’t touch them. Their names couldn’t be mentioned, as any public allusion to them could create the impression that they were complicit in Tabet’s spying. The Syrians also found that Tabet had made every possible effort to prevent the publication of any contact between his various informants; therefore it was very difficult to establish the extent of the spy ring.
In Israel the military censorship imposed total blackout on any mention of Cohen’s arrest. The Israelis still hoped to save him and were determined to prevent the news about him from reaching the local media. But there were some people who had the right to know. One evening a stranger visited Elie’s brothers. “Your brother has been arrested in Damascus, and accused of spying for Israel,” the man said. The brothers were stunned. One of them, Maurice, rushed to his mother’s home in Bat Yam. “Mother, you should be strong,” he said. “Elie was arrested in Syria.”
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