Eli Cohen

Eli Cohen (1924 to 1965) was an Israeli intelligence officer who spent three years undercover in Damascus posing as a wealthy Syrian businessman, rose close enough to Syria’s ruling circle to be a candidate for a cabinet post, and was hanged in public in Marjeh Square after Syrian counterintelligence traced his radio transmissions. He is widely regarded as Israel’s greatest spy. The record of what he actually sent, as distinct from what Israeli popular memory has layered onto him since, is itself an honest and remarkable story.

Alexandria to Tel Aviv

Cohen was born on 26 December 1924 in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Jewish family whose roots ran back to Aleppo, Syria, giving him a native Syrian-Arabic dialect and a Mizrahi household’s fluency in Arab manners that would later prove decisive. He was active in Zionist youth organizing in Egypt and helped Jews leave for Israel after the 1948 war, work that got him arrested and briefly held by Egyptian intelligence in 1954, the same year Egypt hanged two members of the Jewish underground network he had been connected to. His parents made aliyah to Israel in 1949; Cohen stayed behind to finish his engineering studies and continue the underground work, and was expelled from Egypt with the rest of the country’s Jewish community after the 1956 Suez war. He reached Israel in 1957, married Nadia Majald, and worked an unremarkable accounting job in Tel Aviv. He applied to Israeli intelligence and was turned down twice, his Egyptian arrest record read as a liability rather than an asset.

The making of Kamel Amin Thaabet

By 1960, with Syria emerging as Israel’s most hostile northern neighbor, military intelligence reconsidered him. Cohen underwent months of training in cryptography, clandestine radio operation, weapons handling and evasive driving, and was given a legend: Kamel Amin Thaabet, a Syrian-born businessman whose family had emigrated to Argentina in 1948 and made a fortune, now returning to build ties in the Arab world. He spent nearly a year in Buenos Aires in 1961 establishing the cover among the city’s Syrian expatriate community, hosting parties and cultivating friendships with Syrian officers and diplomats, including a military attaché who would later, unknowingly, write him letters of introduction to Damascus. Cohen arrived in Damascus in January 1962 with no combat training and no support network beyond a radio and a contact abroad, entirely dependent on the false identity holding.

Damascus: three years inside the regime

It held better than anyone expected. Cohen rented an apartment across from the Syrian army’s general staff headquarters, threw lavish parties, and cultivated officers and Ba’ath party figures, including Colonel Amin al-Hafez, who became Syria’s head of state in 1963. Guests drank and talked shop while Cohen, by his own design, stayed sober and listened. He was reportedly floated for a junior ministerial post, a measure of how deep his access ran, though he worked to avoid a position that would have restricted his movement and made contact with Israel impossible. Over three years he transmitted a stream of political and military intelligence: warnings of a planned 1963 coup, details of Syria’s project to divert the Jordan River’s headwaters (intelligence that let Israeli forces destroy the diversion equipment in 1964), and detailed information on Syrian fortifications along the Golan Heights, the plateau from which Syrian guns had shelled Israeli farms below for years. That fortification intelligence would matter enormously two years after his death, when the IDF overran the Golan in a single day during the Six-Day War of June 1967, a campaign then-Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan directed.

Capture, trial, execution

Syrian counterintelligence, using Soviet-supplied direction-finding equipment, had been hunting the source of unexplained radio transmissions for months. On the night of 24 January 1965, officers led by Colonel Ahmed Su’edani caught Cohen transmitting from his apartment. He was tortured and interrogated for weeks, tried before a military court in a proceeding widely regarded as predetermined, and sentenced to death for espionage. International appeals for clemency, including from the Pope and the French and Canadian governments, went nowhere. On 18 May 1965, Cohen was hanged in public in Damascus’s Marjeh Square before a crowd; his body was left displayed for several hours. He is reported to have told his captors, in substance, that he had acted as a soldier for his country. Syria has never returned his remains, despite decades of Israeli requests renewed under successive governments, including after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.

The legend, tested against the record

The most famous story attached to Cohen, that he persuaded Syrian officers to plant eucalyptus trees at Golan gun positions “for shade,” then radioed the tree locations to Israel as artillery markers used in 1967, is the detail every retelling reaches for, including the 2019 Netflix dramatization of his life, and skeptics point to its absence from the archive to cast doubt on the whole legend. The doubt does not survive the record any better than the tree story does. The eucalyptus detail does not appear in the surviving record of his wartime transmissions, and historians who have studied the archive treat it as an embellishment that grew up around a genuine, well-documented body of fortification intelligence, not as evidence the underlying intelligence was invented. The credit Cohen receives for the Golan’s capture deserves the same precision rather than either inflation or dismissal: he had been dead two years by June 1967, and Syrian positions had continued to be built and altered in that interval, so his intelligence was a foundation for the 1967 campaign rather than its battlefield map. What is documented and undisputed settles the argument: a Mossad agent with no military cover reached the edge of a hostile state’s cabinet table and sent home intelligence that shaped Israel’s northern security for a generation. In May 2025, Israel’s Mossad recovered roughly 2,500 documents, photographs and personal effects from Cohen’s file in Syria’s intelligence archive, presented to his widow Nadia Cohen at a ceremony marking the sixtieth anniversary of his execution. His remains are still in Syria, but streets, a museum in Herzliya, and Israel’s enduring reputation for penetrating its enemies’ capitals all carry his name forward.

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