by Dan Raviv
Cohen kept extending his leave and hinted that, after nearly four years abroad, he might want to come in from the cold. He mentioned that he felt danger from Colonel Ahmed Suedani, head of the intelligence branch of the Syrian army.
Unfortunately, Cohen’s case officers did not pay attention to the warning signs. They were too focused on preparing for conflict, because there was another bout of tension on the border. One could not be certain, but war seemed to be on the horizon. It was vital to have reliable intelligence from Damascus, and the Mossad applied pressure on Cohen to return to his espionage post as soon as possible.
In the last two months of 1964, Cohen forgot the rules of prudence. His broadcasts became more frequent, and in the space of five weeks he sent 31 radio transmissions. His case officers in Tel Aviv should have restrained him, but none did. The material he was sending was just too good to stop.
Apparently guided by radio direction-finding equipment, most likely operated by Soviet advisers, Colonel Suedani’s intelligence men broke into Cohen’s apartment on January 18, 1965, and caught him red-handed, tapping his telegraph key in the middle of a transmission.
A day later, rumors of the sensational arrest of a highly placed Syrian named Taabeth in Damascus reached Israel. The information was brought by a third-country citizen who did some work in Syria, while moonlighting for the Mossad.
The State of Israel immediately went into action, hoping against hope to get Eli Cohen out of Syria—or, at least, to keep him alive. The government quietly hired a prominent French lawyer, who arranged official appeals to European governments and to the Pope.
Syria turned a deaf ear. A court in Damascus sentenced Cohen to death, and he was hanged in a public square—to the cheers of a large crowd—on May 18, 1965. The Syrians did allow the spy to send a final written message to his family. “I am writing to you these last words, a few minutes before my end,” he wrote. “I request you, dear Nadia, to pardon me and take care of yourself and our children. Don’t deprive them or yourself of anything. You can get remarried, in order not to deprive the children of a father.”
He also asked his wife “not to spend your time weeping about something already done,” adding that she should “look forward for a better future!”
To this day, Cohen’s family has waged a public campaign for Syria to return his body for burial in Israel. The Israeli government brought up the subject indirectly through third-party envoys. The Mossad tried to locate the grave. But Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship may well have been sincere in declaring privately that no one in Syria knew where Cohen was buried.
A new clue as to why this Israeli hero was caught by the Syrians came from another operative, Masoud Buton. He was planted inside Lebanon from 1958 to 1962, when he quit over a financial dispute with Mossad headquarters and moved to France. His memoirs declare that he created the Taabeth identity during his time in Beirut.
Buton was born in 1923 in Jerusalem to a Jewish family which had already been there, under Turkish and then British rule, for eight generations. After fighting in Israel’s war of independence and rising to the rank of major, he was recruited by Aman. He used his Arabic-language fluency to live in French-ruled Algiers in the mid-1950s and to create his own false identity there, while also spying on senior members of the Algerian nationalist movement. Israel shared that information, including Buton’s photos, with French intelligence.
As an “Algerian businessman” named Tallab, representing a British company, he moved to Beirut in 1958 and managed to befriend senior Lebanese officials. He acted the part of a devout Muslim and attended a mosque at least once a day.
Buton/Tallab occasionally crossed into Syria, where he was able to photograph army bases. In Lebanon, he obtained plans and drawings of Beirut International Airport, and that would help Israeli commando troops many years later.
He was ordered, in 1962, to procure identity documents for a “Lebanese-born businessman of Syrian extraction.” Buton managed to do that and sent the papers for a Kamel Taabeth to Aman’s Unit 131, but later he sent a warning that the documentation might be compromised in some way. Still, he writes, the identity was provided to Eli Cohen: a mistake, Buton claims, because Syrian officials eventually became suspicious.
Mossad chief Amit strongly rejected Buton’s claim that, by ignoring his warning about the papers, the agency somehow contributed to Cohen’s downfall. But Cohen’s wife and family have said that they believe Buton.
Considering that the Israelis had an intelligence asset so well placed as Cohen, it is all the more impressive that they had yet another at the same time: Wolfgang Lotz, in Egypt.
Lotz was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921. His mother was a Jewish actress, his father a Christian who managed a theater in Berlin. For his own perilous espionage act, it was lucky that Lotz was not circumcised.
After his parents divorced and Adolf Hitler rose to power, the young Lotz was brought by his mother to Palestine in search of a safe life as Jews. Wolfgang changed his name to Ze’ev Gur-Arie, ze’ev being the Hebrew word for “wolf.”
Lotz/Gur-Arie joined the Haganah underground in 1937 and fought for the British in World War II, infiltrating German lines in North Africa. He mastered Arabic and English, as well as German and Hebrew.
He served as an officer in the Israeli army, and in the late 1950s he was recruited by Unit 131 of Aman to be planted in Egypt.
According to the “legend” given to him, Lotz had been a German army officer and had fought under Rommel in the North African deserts. After the war, he supposedly moved to Australia and became rich from breeding horses. His ostensible ambition in Egypt was to establish a large ranch for the same purpose.
Lotz was one of the few secret agents ever to work using his real name, with his own genuine papers.
As Unit 131 was transferred to the Mossad, the German-born operative was known affectionately there as “Wolfie.” His official code name would be “Shimshon” (Samson).
He underwent a battery of tests, known to Israeli intelligence as “stations”: psychological, psychiatric, handwriting analysis, and field-operation techniques. One of the testers wrote that Lotz/Gur-Arie was a “self-loving type,” was “vulnerable to pain and threats,” would not likely “stand up to suffering,” and would have “problems in overcoming passion for women and wine.”
His other ratings, however, were highly positive, so Gur-Arie was accepted for the mission. “He had nerves of steel,” his handler, Yaakov Nahmias, said. “He could look the Angel of Death in the eyes, invite him to a drink, and raise a glass to him.”
Gur-Arie/Lotz was, however, a bit apprehensive about going to Egypt, in part because someone might recognize him from his service with British forces there. The commander of Unit 131, Yosef Yariv, suggested a few warm-up trips, including Libya, Damascus for three weeks, and then Cairo for five weeks to scout around and learn about Arabian horses. When Lotz got back to Israel, Yariv said many years later, “he was brimming with confidence.”
His initial operational order from June 1960 and his contract are preserved in Gur-Arie’s personal file in the Mossad archive. The contract for the gutsy move to Egypt stipulated that he would be employed for five years with the option of an extension or cancellation upon one month’s notification. In addition to his modest government salary, he received an expense account of $350 a month plus one British pound per day as compensation for residing in an “enemy country.”
Now, as Lotz, the spy enthusiastically hit the Egyptian ground running at the start of 1961. A convivial and charismatic man, he seemed the happy host of parties for senior army officers, for a police commander who became a best friend, and for many of the right people in wealthy Cairo high society. He smoked hashish with them and encouraged them to talk about their defense-related work.
Using a tiny radio hidden in the heel of a riding boot, and later a larger radio in a clothing drawer, he telegraphed detailed reports to Tel Aviv.
Lotz’s operational order was
radically altered when he was told to join Isser Harel’s ill-fated campaign against the German scientists in Egypt. The new instruction from Tel Aviv stated: “You are to get close to the circle of scientists consisting of Paul Goercke, Wolfgang Pilz, and Hans Kleinwachter. The goal is to liquidate them.”
Unruffled by being converted into an assassin, Lotz turned to the new mission with his usual willingness to serve. His handlers sent him explosives hidden in Yardley soaps. Lotz inserted the materials and trigger mechanisms into envelopes, which he mailed from Cairo to the scientists. Unfortunately one of the envelopes was opened by the secretary of the rocket scientist Pilz, and the explosion left her blind.
More errors followed. Every few months, the spy went to Europe to report to an Aman or Mossad case officer. On a night train from Paris to Germany in June 1961, Lotz met a tall, curvaceous blonde who was a dozen years younger than he. They quite simply fell in love. Just two weeks later, Wolfgang married Waltraud.
The only problem was that he was already married. He and his Israeli wife Rivka had a son, Oded, who was then 12, and they lived in Paris under the supervision of the Mossad’s substantial station there.
Lotz’s bosses in Tel Aviv learned of his bigamy only by chance. “One day we received a letter from him,” Yariv related. “The envelope had a black lining, to prevent others from reading it. We noticed that the lining, which was a bit torn, contained an incomplete address, and we were able to identify the words ‘Mrs. and Mr. Lotz.’”
Mrs.? What Mrs.?
The Mossad immediately summoned “Shimshon” to Israel to explain. Once they were face to face, Yariv asked, as though offhandedly, “How’s the wife?”
Lotz replied quickly, “Fine, thanks.” The spy was too self-confident to follow that with an immediate “oops.” According to Yariv, Lotz tended to conceal things, but when presented with the facts he immediately confirmed them. And so it was, as he discussed his two simultaneous spouses with his bosses.
The spy chiefs considered aborting the entire mission and bringing “Shimshon” back to Israel—perhaps for punishment—but he was so successful that the Mossad did not want to lose him. It was decided to leave everything as it was, and not to tell Rivka about her husband’s other wife. A Mossad psychologist observed that they always knew Lotz could not resist young, pretty women.
“It was a cardinal error to let him live a true double life,” one of the spymasters admitted years later. “His personality thus became even more fragmented, with two families: one in Paris and the other in Cairo.”
Lotz did tell Waltraud, his second and simultaneous wife, that he was a spy—but not that he was working for Israel. She apparently thought that West Germany was his employer, and, perhaps adding to the excitement of their relationship, she agreed to cooperate. Yariv said Waltraud Lotz “was an extraordinary success, which helped him in his work.”
Lotz/Gur-Arie also told his son, in Paris, more than he should have. Oded recalled, more than 40 years later, that his father revealed that he was a spy—and they enjoyed going to a James Bond movie together. The elder Gur-Arie remarked that real-life espionage was even more exciting than the film. The secret was a difficult burden for a teenage boy, but his father must have figured that Oded would be more careful about what he said if he understood some of what was at stake.
Only in 2007 did Oded Gur-Arie, an entrepreneur and a professor of business administration who lives in the United States, agree to speak publicly about his suffering and about how his father betrayed him and his mother.
The younger Gur-Arie distinctly remembered the morning of February 27, 1965. He left his home on Pierre Guerin Street in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris. As he did every Saturday, he walked to the local kiosk to buy the International Herald Tribune. “I took the paper and started to walk home,” Gur-Arie recalled, “and, as always, I glanced at the main headline.”
That was the shock of his life. The front page said that six West Germans had disappeared in Egypt, among them Wolfgang Lotz and his wife, Waltraud. The headline knocked him for a double loop. First, “because I knew Dad was a spy and it was obvious to me that he hadn’t ‘disappeared,’ but had been caught by the Egyptians. I was sure they would discover that he was an Israeli. That would be the end of the story. They would kill him.”
The second shock came, he said, “when I asked myself who this Waltraud was. His wife? My mother was his wife! How could he have another wife? And what was I going to tell my mother in a few minutes? I understood that the story was getting complicated.”
He went upstairs and into the family apartment. “I told my mother that Dad had disappeared in Cairo. She grabbed the paper and read the report quickly. She remained unruffled and went to the phone. She called our liaison in the Mossad.
“Apparently because it was Shabbat [the Jewish Sabbath], the Mossad people hadn’t woken up that morning,” he remarked caustically. “At that moment they didn’t know that Dad had been arrested. I imagine that within minutes all the Mossad agents in Europe rushed out to buy the Herald Tribune in order to be updated. The fact that the Mossad didn’t know that Dad had been caught and that they heard it from my mother, who heard it from me after I had read about it in the paper, was another breaking point for me.
“Until then, I was certain that the Mossad was omnipotent, that they had resources and that they always knew everything. As a youngster, the reality came as a great disappointment to me.”
On several levels, the Mossad suffered a harsh blow when Lotz was arrested—with the German wife—by Egyptian secret police who burst into their Cairo apartment on February 22. To this day, the Mossad does not know with certainty how “Shimshon” was discovered.
One theory for what occurred—which Yariv did not rule out—held that Lotz was caught by accident: pure, dumb luck for the Egyptians. The prevailing explanation, however, is that a Soviet counterespionage team, training the locals on how to tighten their security, detected Lotz’s radio transmitter. That would be similar to the process that doomed Eli Cohen in Syria.
There were clear differences between the Lotz and Cohen cases, however. Whereas torture forced Cohen to admit he was an Israeli spy and he was hanged, Lotz tenaciously clung to the contention that he was a non-Jewish German who had helped Israel just to earn some money.
Immediately upon Lotz’s arrest, Amit contacted West Germany’s General Gehlen and told him about the arrest of the Israeli operative. Gehlen agreed to Amit’s request that he take the Israeli spy under his wing and present him to the Egyptian authorities as Germany’s spy in Cairo. To prevent the possibility that someone in Israel would recognize Lotz and blab about it, the Mossad obtained equipment to jam the reception of Egyptian television broadcasts in Israel during the trial.
The Egyptians, too, preferred to portray Lotz as a German spy. That would not be nearly so embarrassing as being penetrated by a Zionist agent.
Wolfgang and Waltraud were convicted by an Egyptian court. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, and she was to serve three years. Both were freed after three years, part of an Israeli-Egyptian prisoner swap seven months after the Six-Day War.
Lotz/Gur-Arie and his wife were flown to Germany and then to Israel. The Mossad helped Lotz rehabilitate himself, a process that included his running a horse ranch near Tel Aviv. Rivka divorced him, but that only strengthened his image as a bon vivant and a national hero.
The former spy, having just gotten out of a bad prison cell, was invited to showy receptions and fabulous parties. He was back on the champagne circuit, and he tried to maintain a far higher standard of living than was possible on his Mossad pension. Lotz’s equine business collapsed, and his condition deteriorated even further after the premature death of Waltraud in 1971, as a result of torture she underwent in the Cairo prison.
Her death, Oded said, utterly broke his father’s heart. Later he would marry for a third time, divorce, and marry yet again. He moved to California to pursue his dream of producing a movie abo
ut his own life. That never led anywhere, and with great frustration he left for Germany. He lived there until his death in 1993 at age 73. This is a sad story, with a lesson: Old spies are rarely happy.
Israel was fortunate to have a few more warning agents planted in Egypt by the Mossad. Decades later, officials refused to allow details to be published, just in case similar methods would have to be used again—perhaps even in the same locations, in some unforeseeable future.
Another key to the success of Israeli intelligence, in the run-up to the 1967 war, was an evolving and well practiced expertise in the use of double agents.
Handling agents is at the heart of espionage work. The handler must often behave like father and mother to his agent. He must be a social worker and a psychologist. He must groom his agent, but remain wary of him. Massage his ego, encourage him, reward him, be a shoulder to lean on and a good listener, but also be prepared to scold.
When the person being manipulated is a double agent, the challenges are multiplied. The art of espionage requires many delicate tasks—from shaking surveillance pursuers, to planting bombs—but none is more sensitive than the craft of “doubling” an enemy operative so that he will work for your side.
“You can never fully know and trust such an agent,” Amit explained. “You cannot be sure to whom his final loyalty is given.”
The double agent moves in a twilight zone between the two sides, crossing lines back and forth. He must be very cautious and sly, lest his actions and true status be exposed. He assumes and discards identities. He presents a false façade of loyalty to one side—or is it false to both sides?—and he must guilefully gain the trust of each.
Two important double agents, run by the Mossad during the Amit era, fed disinformation aimed at deceiving Egypt. One was Victor Grayevsky, who already had done so much for Israel by supplying Shin Bet with a copy of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956.