Field Agent 566 |
Eli Cohen has been a household name in Israel for decades. Sixty one years after his execution in Damascus, he is remembered as probably the greatest spy who ever worked for the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency.
Cohen arrived in Syria, Israel’s virulently hostile neighbor, in 1962 under cover as a Syrian Arab emigre from Buenos Aires. He proceeded to transform himself into an extraordinary asset to Israel’s security.
His accomplishments surface in Field Agent 566: The Eli Cohen Story, an absorbing Israeli documentary now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform.
Comprehensive in scope and depth, this three-part series draws on official transcripts and animated sequences from his show trial, newly discovered documents found after the collapse of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, and archival file footage from Israel, Syria and Argentina.
The film is further strengthened by past and present interviews with Israelis and Syrians whose lives Cohen touched directly or indirectly. These figures include Natan Solomon, the Mossad operative who trained Cohen for his dangerous mission; Nadia Cohen, his widow; Sophie, Cohen’s daughter; Abraham and Morris Cohen, his brothers; Tamir Pardo, a former director of the Mossad, and Amin al-Hafez, the president of Syrian from 1963 to 1966.
This is not the first film about Cohen. Several years ago, for example, Netflix broadcast The Spy, a drama starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Israel’s man in Damascus. And there has been an avalanche of books about him, some of which I have read.
Field Agent 566 unfolds in chronological order, starting with his birth in Alexandria in 1924 and ending with his public hanging in Damascus’ central square, a gruesome scene of which appears in the first 55-minute episode.
I have a special interest in Cohen.
His exploits are on a rarefied level and thus compelling. In 1975, a decade after his untimely death, I travelled to Syria as a reporter and visited Martyr’s Square in downtown Damascus, where he was hanged in front of thousands of spectators. This experience sharpened my interest in him.
In this documentary, viewers are told relatively little about his formative years in Alexandria, Egypt, where he was a member of a secret Zionist group that facilitated the departure of Egyptian Jews to Israel. Cohen was arrested in 1956, around the time of the Suez War. Upon his release, he and his family immigrated to Israel.
Cohen was employed as a bookkeeper in a Tel Aviv department store when he was recruited by the Mossad. The film does not state clearly why Cohen caught the eye of the Mossad, but he was certainly a promising catch. As the authors Zwy Aldouby and Jerrold Ballinger write in The Shattered Silence, a biography about Cohen, he was known for his swift intelligence, retentive mind, language ability and other special attributes, which would enable him to penetrate the highest echelons of the Syrian government.
After a nine-month training period, during which he learned the arcane art of espionage, he was dispatched to Argentina to establish himself as a Syrian businessman under the name of Kamel Amin Thaabet, a name the Mossad “borrowed” from a deceased Arab who had lived in Buenos Aires.
He told his wife he was going to Argentina as an employee of the Ministry of Defence. Cohen spent eight months in the city, learning Spanish and meeting Syrian emigres. One of the Syrians he encountered was Amin al-Hafez, a major figure in the ruling Baath Party and the Syrian military attache in Argentina who was born in Aleppo, the city in northern Syria where Cohen’s family had lived before moving to Alexandria.
Cohen arrived in Damascus in January 1962. Unbeknownst to him, his border crossing from Lebanon into Syria was facilitated by a Syrian in the employ of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
He rented a flat in an apartment building in an upscale neighborhood across the street from Syrian military headquarters. A fluent Arabic speaker, Cohen blended into his surroundings seamlessly, establishing contact with the creme de la creme of Syrian society. He did not “look” Jewish, says a Syrian who knew him back then.
For the next three years, he would occasionally fly to Europe to update his handler on developments and return to Israel periodically for debriefing sessions with the Mossad and visits with Nadia and their growing family. He never told her he was on an assignment in Syria.
Much to Cohen’s good fortune, Amin al-Hafez seized power in a coup in 1963, thus ascending to the presidency of Syria. Thanks to his friendship with Hafez, the Syrian authorities would consider appointing him as minister of information, according to Aldouby and Ballinger.
And in a sign of his trustworthiness, Cohen received permission to visit the Golan Heights, a restricted military area off bounds to civilians, no less than five times. The vital information he relayed to the Mossad about this mountain range overlooking the Sea of Galilee proved to be of immense value to Israel during the 1967 Six Day War, when the Israeli army captured the Golan.
Cohen, too, provided the Israeli government with reports of an impending plan by Syria to divert the waters of the Jordan River away from Israel. The Israeli Air Force bombed these diversionary sites.
During his last visit to Israel, Cohen met General Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces. Rabin and other highly-placed Israeli officials complimented him on his intelligence-gathering achievements. His brother, Morris, however, pleaded with him not to return to Syria, but the Mossad assured Nadia that he was safe there.
Cohen himself appears to have been reluctant to resume his activities in Syria. He was supposedly lonely and nervous about being exposed. Pardo suggests that he should have been pulled out. Nadia also wonders why he was sent back.
During his final stint in Syria, Cohen met the Nazi war criminal Franz Rademacher, who was a fugitive from justice in Damascus.
Cohen’s downfall can be traced back to his dedication to his job. Meir Amit, a former director of the Mossad, believes he endangered himself by making excessive transmissions to Israel. Once they were detected by the SovietUnion, a close ally of Syria, Syrian operatives burst into his flat and arrested him.
He was subsequently interrogated and tortured, as were some Jewish residents of Damascus. Cohen’s associates were rounded up as well.
Shortly afterward, Wolfgang Lotz, an Israeli spy in Egypt, was arrested. Excerpts from an old interview with him are integrated into the film.
During Cohen’s sham trial, he was denied a lawyer. After his death sentence was handed down, the Syrian government received appeals for clemency from French President Charles DeGaulle, Queen Elizabeth and the pope. Syria rebuffed a last ditch ransom offer from Israel to reduce the severity of his punishment.
Field Agent 566 documents these events in thorough fashion, leaving viewers with the impression that Israel should have withdrawn Cohen from duty in Syria while there was still a chance to do so.
Be that as it may, Cohen died as a martyr in Syria, his courage and resourcefulness reverberating to this day.