Our Man in Damascus

On the morning of May 18, 1965, a crowd gathered in Marjeh Square in the heart of Damascus. A gallows had been erected overnight. The man led to it was Eli Cohen — an Egyptian-born Jew from Alexandria who, for nearly four years, had lived among them as Kamel Amin Thaabet, a wealthy, charming Syrian businessman with impeccable connections and a famous fondness for throwing lavish parties.

The cover story had been built with patience. In 1961, Cohen moved to Buenos Aires, posing as an expatriate Syrian businessman returning home one day. He spent months ingratiating himself with the Syrian community in Argentina — and, crucially, with exiled Syrian officers who, after the Ba'athist coup of March 1963, would seize power back home. When Cohen arrived in Damascus in February 1962, he did not come as a stranger. He came as a friend of the future regime. He quickly befriended Amin al-Hafiz, who would become Syria's president, and moved through Damascus's military and political elite with extraordinary ease. At his alcohol-fueled gatherings, loose-lipped generals and officials spoke freely.

What he sent back to Israel was pure gold. Cohen toured Syrian fortifications in the Golan Heights and reported their positions and construction in detail. He transmitted information about Syrian plans to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River — a scheme Israel regarded as a potential casus belli. He communicated by radio transmitter, hidden letters, and secret trips home to his wife Nadia and their three children. His handlers grew alarmed: Cohen's transmissions became longer and more frequent, and in 1964 he told them he felt the danger closing in. They considered pulling him out. He stayed.

In January 1965, Syrian counterintelligence — reportedly with Soviet-supplied radio direction-finding equipment — tracked his signal to its source. He was arrested mid-transmission, tried by a military court under martial law, and sentenced to death on March 31. Israel pleaded for his life; international figures appealed; Syria refused. On May 18 he was publicly hanged in Marjeh Square. His body was never returned to Israel.

Cohen is remembered in Israel as its greatest spy — streets bear his name, and in May 2025 the Mossad recovered some 2,500 documents and personal items from Syrian archives: his false identity papers, surveillance notes, maps of Syrian military sites around Quneitra, the keys to his Damascus apartment, and, in an orange folder marked "Nadia Cohen," his widow's decades of pleas to world leaders for her husband's return.

The intelligence Cohen gathered on the Golan fortifications proved decisive. Two years after his death, in the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israeli forces captured the Golan Heights in a campaign fought with maps he had helped draw. Few spies have ever been so directly vindicated by history.