Eli Cohen

Eli Cohen was born in Alexandria in 1924 to a Jewish family from Aleppo. Suspected by the Egyptian authorities of helping Jews leave for Israel, he was forced out after the Sinai War and settled in Israel in 1957. The Mossad recruited him in 1960 and gave him the identity of Kamel Amin Thabet, a Syrian businessman coming home from Argentina; he spent 1961 among the Arabs of Buenos Aires and moved to Damascus in February 1962. After the Ba'ath Party seized power in 1963 he befriended officers and politicians at the top of the regime, radioed reports home, toured the Syrian fortifications on the Golan Heights and sent sketches of their positions. A popular story says he had trees planted at each post, later used as markers in 1967.

In January 1965 Syrian intelligence, with Soviet direction-finding equipment, traced his transmissions. He was hanged in Marjeh Square in Damascus on 18 May 1965, and his remains have never been returned. In 2018 the Mossad recovered his wristwatch, and on 18 May 2025 Israel announced that it had brought home some 2,500 documents and belongings, the entire Syrian archive on him.