Yossi Melman on Israel’s Most Famous Spy: What we learn from the Eli Cohen files

In 2019, Netflix released a six-episode miniseries starring the English comedian and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen played an Israeli spy, Eli Cohen. The latter Cohen was a Jewish immigrant from Egypt who, once in Israel, was recruited and trained by the Mossad. He then assumed the identity of Kamel Amin Thaabet, a wealthy Arab businessman who, having eventually moved to Damascus, became a backer and confidant of key officials in the Baath party. From his home in Syria, Cohen as Thaabet dispatched vast quantities of military and political intelligence to the Israelis throughout the early 1960s. Viewers of the Netflix show, The Spy, see all of this dramatized, as they also see Cohen’s eventual capture, torture, and hanging. The Netflix series, and the story it brings to a new generation of viewers, is true.

Eli Cohen is celebrated as one of Israel’s great intelligence agents, one of its great mistaravim, or those who assume the identity of Arabs to carry out their missions. There are streets and institutions and many children and even, in the Golan, a town in Israel named after Eli Cohen. For 60 years the Israeli government has tried to persuade, bribe, cajole, and if necessary steal the Syrian government’s Eli Cohen file. During the rule of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, they could not get them. With the fall of the Assad regime, and with a new regime in Damascus looking to curry favor with the United States and the West, earlier this week the Syrians handed over some 2,500 documents from Syria’s Eli Cohen file.

This week, Yossi Melman—a Haaretz reporter, journalist, and author of some eight English-language books on Israeli intelligence—joins Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver to talk about Eli Cohen, what Israel has reclaimed, and why this story remains so important some six decades on.