Israel's retrieval of Eli Cohen items revives conflicting claims over unmasking of super spy

Egypt's influential media figures boast about role of country's own spy in exposing one of Israel's most valuable assets in Syria 60 years ago

Elie Cohen, far left, head of an Israeli spy ring, listens as he is sentenced to death by a special military court in Damascus, Syria, on May 8, 1965. AP

Israel's revelation that it had recovered from Syria the security file and personal items of one of its most famous spies has drawn an unlikely response in Egypt.

There, influential commentators have recalled how one of their own was responsible for Eli Cohen's arrest and execution 60 years ago.

Boasting about its own spy in Israel exposing Cohen in 1965 seems to be an appropriate reaction from Egypt, whose relations with its neighbour and former enemy are at their worst since they signed a peace treaty in 1979, only 14 years after Cohen was hanged in a Damascus square.

"It's clear that we have seized on the Eli Cohen story to exercise bragging rights," said Negad Borai, a veteran human rights lawyer and a member of the council of guardians for Egypt's National Dialogue, a forum set up by President Abdel Fattah El Sisi to help chart the country's future.

"It's a message to remind everyone, particularly Israel, that Egypt is a powerful nation," he said of the nationwide reaction to the news about Cohen.

The retrieval of the spy's security file and personal items, announced on Sunday, made headlines across much of the region, evoking memories of a time – the 1960s – when enmity between Arab nations and Israel was at its most intense. It also comes at a time when animosity towards Israel has deepened over its war in Gaza since October 2023.

A photo released by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office shows the identity documents used by Mossad spy Eli Cohen. Israeli Prime Minister's Office via AP

The Cohen story has taken on added relevance at a time when many Arabs are enraged by what they see as the fateful role played by Israel's spies in the region since the devastating war in Gaza began.

Israel has been blamed for the assassination of some of its most high-profile enemies in places such as Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran – killings widely thought to have been made possible by the information its spies provided.

"The day of his [Cohen's] execution was a glorious day," declared Amr Adeeb, perhaps the most popular Arab talk show host, on his nightly TV show.

"Our own spy attended Cohen's memorial service in Israel while overjoyed that he died," said Adeeb, whose programme Al Hekayah (The Story) is aired by the Saudi-owned MBC network.

In a surprise announcement, Israel on Sunday said 2,500 documents and personal items belonging to Cohen were returned to Tel Aviv from Syria in a covert operation carried out by its Mossad spy agency and a foreign counterpart it did not identify.

They were presented on Sunday to his widow, Nadia Cohen, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad director David Barnea, a statement from the Israeli leader's office read.

Among the recovered items were handwritten letters from Cohen to his family, his will – which he wrote in Arabic shortly before his execution – photos taken during his years undercover in Syria and keys to his upmarket Damascus apartment.

Cohen, who forged friendships with key figures in Syria's echelons of power, was arrested in January 1965 and hanged in a central Damascus square in May of that year. His burial place remains unknown to this day.

Egyptian intelligence officials, according to many accounts, tipped off the government of then-Syrian president Amin Al Hafez about Cohen's true identity.

That narrative took on more credibility when referenced in a book by the late Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, a confidant of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's president from 1956 to 1970, who was widely respected for his authoritative writings on the inner workings of the nationalist leader's rule.

Cohen was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1924 to Jewish parents who had migrated from Aleppo in Syria but his Mossad handlers cooked up an elaborate deception to enable him to work undercover in Damascus. That included a claim to Syrian ancestry, an Arabic name – Kamel Amin Thabet – and a successful export business in Damascus.

Cohen's exploits in Syria and the sensitive intelligence he obtained for Israel have been documented in numerous books by authors from Israel and beyond. They were the subject of the 2019 Netflix mini-series The Spy, in which British actor Sacha Baron Cohen played Cohen.

According to the Egyptian account, his cover was blown when an Egyptian spy saw Cohen in Israel and recognised him as the same man who had appeared in published photos alongside top Syrian officials and military commanders.

Significantly, according to that account, the man who identified him was Egypt's own star spy Refaat Al Gammal, better known as Raafat Al Haggan, who operated in Israel for 17 years under the name Jack Bitton.

However, Yosri Fouda, a London-based investigative journalist from Egypt, offers a slightly different version of Cohen's exposure.

Writing on Facebook on Monday, Fouda said Al Haggan recognised Cohen from a family photo shown to him by a friend. She told him the man posing with a woman and seven children in the photo was her brother-in-law, Eli Cohen.

While Cohen is widely credited for providing Tel Aviv with information that proved crucial in Israel's swift defeat of Syria in the 1967 war, Al Haggan's warning in 1967 to his Egyptian handlers that an Israeli attack was imminent was not taken seriously, according to published Egyptian accounts. Israel seized Syria's Golan Heights, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank during that war.

The Egyptian account of how Al Haggan was responsible for the arrest of Cohen is not the only one that has been circulating over the years.

Other narratives credit the technical help the Syrians received from their Russian allies that made it possible to identify and locate the Morse code signal Cohen used to relay information to Israel from his apartment in Damascus.

Syrian authorities, embittered by the acrimonious break-up in 1961 of their country's short-lived union with Egypt, also claimed credit at the time for exposing Cohen.

Like Fouda, Egyptian talk show host Ahmed Moussa was sceptical of Israel's account of how it obtained Cohen's documents and items.

He suggested the new Syrian government may have simply handed them over as a goodwill gesture to the US, Israel's chief benefactor and close ally, after interim President Ahmed Al Shara met President Donald Trump last week in Riyadh.

Moussa said Israel “always wanted to look important and strong”. The logical next step was for the Syrian and Israeli governments to join forces in trying to locate Cohen’s remains and repatriate them to Israel, he suggested.

Syrians have meanwhile taken to social media to express disapproval over the loss of Cohen's possessions, saying it indicated co-operation between the new Damascus regime and Israel.

Syrian satirist Mohammad Al Salloum said it undermined efforts to preserve the national memory.

"The archives of the Al Assad era belong to all the people and they have a right to access it,” he said, alluding to the authoritarian rule of more 50 years by the late president Hafez Al Assad and his son Bashar, whose regime was toppled in December.