However, before leaving for Syria, he first had to learn the Syrian accent, which was very different from the Egyptian one. At the same time he undertook more technical training and learned how to use miniature transmitters and micro photographic devices. In short, the A-Z of how to be the perfect spy.
Israel and Syria had been at war ever since the creation of the Jewish state, with trouble regularly breaking out on the borders between the two countries. At the time, the Golan (a plateau overlooking Galilee) was still under Syrian control and they would sporadically open fire on the fisherman or the farmers of the northern villages. Each time, the Israelis would retaliate and fire rockets. Israel also continued to monitor Syrian armed forces, who were receiving increasingly sophisticated equipment from their Soviet allies. There was a general fear in Israel that sooner or later, Syria would mount an offensive on its northern border.
There was another issue that was equally important: water, an essential factor that still exists in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians today. Syria, which controlled the Galan, could easily divert the rivers that feed into the Sea of Galilee. The Israelis used this water to irrigate their crops in the south and in the Negev Desert, in particular.
Eli Cohen was now ready to fulfil his first mission. However, as he prepared to travel to Syria, he was surprised to find that Mossad were to send him to Argentina instead!
Gordon Thomas
62
Cohen was one of the Jews that were expelled from Egypt after the Suez Crisis in 1957.
He arrived in Haifa and felt a stranger in his new country. In 1957 he was recruited by the Israeli military counterintelligence unit, where his work as an analyst soon bored him.
He enquired about the entry pathway into Mossad, but his candidacy was rejected. ‘Our refusal hurt him deeply’, Meir Amit (the head of Mossad) told me. Cohen left the army and married an Iraqi woman named Nadia. For two years, Cohen led a quiet life working as a clerk at an insurance office in Tel Aviv. Unbeknownst to him, his application was reassessed by Mossad during a review of rejected applications. Meir Amit had been looking for a particular type of agent for a very special mission. Having found no one suitable in his current files, he began to go through the rejected ones. Cohen seemed to offer the best possibility and was quietly put under surveillance. Weekly reports sent back to Mossad spoke of his monotonous routine and his love for his wife and children. Eli Cohen was a hard worker and gave evidence of his ability to work under pressure. Finally, he was told that Mossad regarded him as fit for service.
Mossad sent Cohen to Argentina where there was actually a strong Arab community of at least 500,000 exiles from the Near and Middle East. Eli needed to hone his legend: his new surname was Thaabet and he had been born in Beirut. However, is family were of Syrian origin and had long ago emigrated to Argentina. Another anecdotal detail lies in the fact that Cohen's real Jewish origins actually did originate in Syria! Mossad wanted to fully prepare his legend and for his cover as an exile to be credible, he must first be familiar with Argentina and the way of life out there in the Arab colony.
Naturally, Cohen did not travel directly from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires: he had a stopover in Zurich, where he was looked after by local Mossad correspondents. Cohen took this opportunity to rid himself of anything that still attached him to Israel, such as his clothes, papers and photographs of his family. As he boarded the plane for Argentina, he was now a businessman specialising in imports and exports, with a beautiful South American passport bearing the name of Thaabet and a big wad of dollars in his pocket.
A cruel reality was that his family knew nothing of his new life. When Cohen wanted to send news to his wife, he had to send it along with his reports to Zurich, where a Mossad agent would then change the envelope before sending it on to Tel Aviv. Great care was taken to change the point of origin so as to imply that Cohen was continuously on the move. Cohen had to lie to his wife: a genuine ordeal for a man who was very attached to his family. Over the years, he became increasingly resentful of the separation and the double life that forced him to lie to those to whom he held most dear.
He spent several months in Argentina and used his time to test the extent of his spying abilities. He immediately sank into the skin of his ‘character'; frequenting places where he could meet other Syrian and Lebanese exiles and make friends with some of them. He soon realised that his cover was credible, but he still had to be on his guard, having been warned before his departure that the Arab secret services were very active in Argentina. In any case, he soon had a decisive encounter with the Syrian editor of an Arab newspaper and the two men talked a lot about politics. In the 1960s Nasser had been able to unite the destinies of Egypt and Syria by forming the famous United Arab Republic. But a growing number of Syrians had criticised the unification, which was increasingly turning into an outright annexation of Syria by Egypt. The hostility was crystallised by the Ba'ath Party, in particular, and it seemed that they would seize power in Damascus sooner or later.
Cohen professed his support for Ba'ath, and in conversation with the journalist (who was also a Ba'ath supporter), implied that his one aim was to end his life in
