Spies Against Armageddon (19 page)

At the start of 1962, he was ready to move to the “target” country. First came a flight to Lebanon, and then a long taxi ride across the border into Syria—with a sophisticated, high-speed radio transmitter hidden in his luggage. Cohen/Taabeth was also carrying genuine letters of introduction, penned by Syrians in South America. These were the fruits of his smooth socializing labors.

In Damascus, he was instantly the fascinating new man in town, having been recommended by everyone who was anyone in Buenos Aires. Before long, one of his best friends from Argentina, Major Amin al-Hafez, became the president of Syria.

While running an import-export business, Cohen/Taabeth cultivated his political contacts. He arranged lavish parties at his home, with pretty women—some of them paid to be intimately entertaining for his powerful new friends. This was expensive. The Israeli spy had to have plenty of cash, as well as nerves of steel. But it paid off.

He was regularly invited to military facilities, and he drove with senior officers all along Syria’s Golan Heights, looking down at the vulnerable farms and roadways of Israel down below. Cohen made a point, of course, of memorizing the location of all the Syrian bunkers and artillery pieces. He was able to describe troop deployments along the border in detail, and he focused on the tank traps that could prevent Israeli forces from climbing the heights if war were to break out. He also furnished a list of all the Syrian pilots and accurate sketches of the weapons mounted on their warplanes.

The data he sent to Tel Aviv, mainly by tapping Morse Code dots and dashes on his telegraph key, covered all areas of life in Syria. Israeli intelligence was able to get a remarkably complete picture of an enemy country that had seemed impenetrable.

Ironically, one of the communications officers who handled the coded messages to and from Damascus was Cohen’s own brother Maurice. For years, each brother did not know that the other was working for Israeli intelligence. Eli had told Maurice that he was traveling abroad procuring computer parts for the Defense Ministry.

The true clandestine mission, meantime, was transferred from Aman to the Mossad: part of Amit’s move to the Mossad.

If Cohen and his Israeli controllers had only been more cautious, his chances of survival would have been much better. In November 1964, he was on leave in Israel—shedding his Taabeth identity, and trying to be a normal husband and father at home—awaiting the birth of his third child. He always pined for his family and had taken to sending them indirect greetings through his Israeli handlers, without revealing where he was.

Cohen kept extending his leave and hinted that, after nearly four years abroad, he might want to come in from the cold. He mentioned that he felt danger from Colonel Ahmed Suedani, head of the intelligence branch of the Syrian army.

Unfortunately, Cohen’s case officers did not pay attention to the warning signs. They were too focused on preparing for conflict, because there was another bout of tension on the border. One could not be certain, but war seemed to be on the horizon. It was vital to have reliable intelligence from Damascus, and the Mossad applied pressure on Cohen to return to his espionage post as soon as possible.

In the last two months of 1964, Cohen forgot the rules of prudence. His broadcasts became more frequent, and in the space of five weeks he sent 31 radio transmissions. His case officers in Tel Aviv should have restrained him, but none did. The material he was sending was just too good to stop.

Apparently guided by radio direction-finding equipment, most likely operated by Soviet advisers, Colonel Suedani’s intelligence men broke into Cohen’s apartment on January 18, 1965, and caught him red-handed, tapping his telegraph key in the middle of a transmission.

A day later, rumors of the sensational arrest of a highly placed Syrian named Taabeth in Damascus reached Israel. The information was brought by a third-country citizen who did some work in Syria, while moonlighting for the Mossad.

The State of Israel immediately went into action, hoping against hope to get Eli Cohen out of Syria—or, at least, to keep him alive. The government quietly hired a prominent French lawyer, who arranged official appeals to European governments and to the Pope.

Syria turned a deaf ear. A court in Damascus sentenced Cohen to death, and he was hanged in a public square—to the cheers of a large crowd—on May 18, 1965. The Syrians did allow the spy to send a final written message to his family. “I am writing to you these last words, a few minutes before my end,” he wrote. “I request you, dear Nadia, to pardon me and take care of yourself and our children. Don’t deprive them or yourself of anything. You can get remarried, in order not to deprive the children of a father.”

He also asked his wife “not to spend your time weeping about something already done,” adding that she should “look forward for a better future!”

To this day, Cohen’s family has waged a public campaign for Syria to return his body for burial in Israel. The Israeli government brought up the subject indirectly through third-party envoys. The Mossad tried to locate the grave. But Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship may well have been sincere in declaring privately that no one in Syria knew where Cohen was buried.

A new clue as to why this Israeli hero was caught by the Syrians came from another operative, Masoud Buton. He was planted inside Lebanon from 1958 to 1962, when he quit over a financial dispute with Mossad headquarters and moved to France. His memoirs declare that he created the Taabeth identity during his time in Beirut.

Buton was born in 1923 in Jerusalem to a Jewish family which had already been there, under Turkish and then British rule, for eight generations. After fighting in Israel’s war of independence and rising to the rank of major, he was recruited by Aman. He used his Arabic-language fluency to live in French-ruled Algiers in the mid-1950s and to create his own false identity there, while also spying on senior members of the Algerian nationalist movement. Israel shared that information, including Buton’s photos, with French intelligence.

As an “Algerian businessman” named Tallab, representing a British company, he moved to Beirut in 1958 and managed to befriend senior Lebanese officials. He acted the part of a devout Muslim and attended a mosque at least once a day.

Buton/Tallab occasionally crossed into Syria, where he was able to photograph army bases. In Lebanon, he obtained plans and drawings of Beirut International Airport, and that would help Israeli commando troops many years later.

He was ordered, in 1962, to procure identity documents for a “Lebanese-born businessman of Syrian extraction.” Buton managed to do that and sent the papers for a Kamel Taabeth to Aman’s Unit 131, but later he sent a warning that the documentation might be compromised in some way. Still, he writes, the identity was provided to Eli Cohen: a mistake, Buton claims, because Syrian officials eventually became suspicious.

Mossad chief Amit strongly rejected Buton’s claim that, by ignoring his warning about the papers, the agency somehow contributed to Cohen’s downfall. But Cohen’s wife and family have said that they believe Buton.

Considering that the Israelis had an intelligence asset so well placed as Cohen, it is all the more impressive that they had yet another at the same time: Wolfgang Lotz, in Egypt.

Lotz was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1921. His mother was a Jewish actress, his father a Christian who managed a theater in Berlin. For his own perilous espionage act, it was lucky that Lotz was not circumcised.

After his parents divorced and Adolf Hitler rose to power, the young Lotz was brought by his mother to Palestine in search of a safe life as Jews. Wolfgang changed his name to Ze’ev Gur-Arie,
ze’ev
being the Hebrew word for “wolf.”

Lotz/Gur-Arie joined the Haganah underground in 1937 and fought for the British in World War II, infiltrating German lines in North Africa. He mastered Arabic and English, as well as German and Hebrew.

He served as an officer in the Israeli army, and in the late 1950s he was recruited by Unit 131 of Aman to be planted in Egypt.

According to the “legend” given to him, Lotz had been a German army officer and had fought under Rommel in the North African deserts. After the war, he supposedly moved to Australia and became rich from breeding horses. His ostensible ambition in Egypt was to establish a large ranch for the same purpose.

Lotz was one of the few secret agents ever to work using his real name, with his own genuine papers.

As Unit 131 was transferred to the Mossad, the German-born operative was known affectionately there as “Wolfie.” His official code name would be “Shimshon” (Samson).

He underwent a battery of tests, known to Israeli intelligence as “stations”: psychological, psychiatric, handwriting analysis, and field-operation techniques. One of the testers wrote that Lotz/Gur-Arie was a “self-loving type,” was “vulnerable to pain and threats,” would not likely “stand up to suffering,” and would have “problems in overcoming passion for women and wine.”

His other ratings, however, were highly positive, so Gur-Arie was accepted for the mission. “He had nerves of steel,” his handler, Yaakov Nahmias, said. “He could look the Angel of Death in the eyes, invite him to a drink, and raise a glass to him.”

Gur-Arie/Lotz was, however, a bit apprehensive about going to Egypt, in part because someone might recognize him from his service with British forces there. The commander of Unit 131, Yosef Yariv, suggested a few warm-up trips, including Libya, Damascus for three weeks, and then Cairo for five weeks to scout around and learn about Arabian horses. When Lotz got back to Israel, Yariv said many years later, “he was brimming with confidence.”

His initial operational order from June 1960 and his contract are preserved in Gur-Arie’s personal file in the Mossad archive. The contract for the gutsy move to Egypt stipulated that he would be employed for five years with the option of an extension or cancellation upon one month’s notification. In addition to his modest government salary, he received an expense account of $350 a month plus one British pound per day as compensation for residing in an “enemy country.”

Now, as Lotz, the spy enthusiastically hit the Egyptian ground running at the start of 1961. A convivial and charismatic man, he seemed the happy host of parties for senior army officers, for a police commander who became a best friend, and for many of the right people in wealthy Cairo high society. He smoked hashish with them and encouraged them to talk about their defense-related work.

Using a tiny radio hidden in the heel of a riding boot, and later a larger radio in a clothing drawer, he telegraphed detailed reports to Tel Aviv.

Lotz’s operational order was radically altered when he was told to join Isser Harel’s ill-fated campaign against the German scientists in Egypt. The new instruction from Tel Aviv stated: “You are to get close to the circle of scientists consisting of Paul Goercke, Wolfgang Pilz, and Hans Kleinwachter. The goal is to liquidate them.”

Unruffled by being converted into an assassin, Lotz turned to the new mission with his usual willingness to serve. His handlers sent him explosives hidden in Yardley soaps. Lotz inserted the materials and trigger mechanisms into envelopes, which he mailed from Cairo to the scientists. Unfortunately one of the envelopes was opened by the secretary of the rocket scientist Pilz, and the explosion left her blind.

More errors followed. Every few months, the spy went to Europe to report to an Aman or Mossad case officer. On a night train from Paris to Germany in June 1961, Lotz met a tall, curvaceous blonde who was a dozen years younger than he. They quite simply fell in love. Just two weeks later, Wolfgang married Waltraud.

The only problem was that he was already married. He and his Israeli wife Rivka had a son, Oded, who was then 12, and they lived in Paris under the supervision of the Mossad’s substantial station there.

Lotz’s bosses in Tel Aviv learned of his bigamy only by chance. “One day we received a letter from him,” Yariv related. “The envelope had a black lining, to prevent others from reading it. We noticed that the lining, which was a bit torn, contained an incomplete address, and we were able to identify the words ‘Mrs. and Mr. Lotz.’”

Mrs.? What Mrs.?

The Mossad immediately summoned “Shimshon” to Israel to explain. Once they were face to face, Yariv asked, as though offhandedly, “How’s the wife?”

Lotz replied quickly, “Fine, thanks.” The spy was too self-confident to follow that with an immediate “oops.” According to Yariv, Lotz tended to conceal things, but when presented with the facts he immediately confirmed them. And so it was, as he discussed his two simultaneous spouses with his bosses.

The spy chiefs considered aborting the entire mission and bringing “Shimshon” back to Israel—perhaps for punishment—but he was so successful that the Mossad did not want to lose him. It was decided to leave everything as it was, and not to tell Rivka about her husband’s other wife. A Mossad psychologist observed that they always knew Lotz could not resist young, pretty women.

“It was a cardinal error to let him live a true double life,” one of the spymasters admitted years later. “His personality thus became even more fragmented, with two families: one in Paris and the other in Cairo.”

Lotz did tell Waltraud, his second and simultaneous wife, that he was a spy—but not that he was working for Israel. She apparently thought that West Germany was his employer, and, perhaps adding to the excitement of their relationship, she agreed to cooperate. Yariv said Waltraud Lotz “was an extraordinary success, which helped him in his work.”

Lotz/Gur-Arie also told his son, in Paris, more than he should have. Oded recalled, more than 40 years later, that his father revealed that he was a spy—and they enjoyed going to a James Bond movie together. The elder Gur-Arie remarked that real-life espionage was even more exciting than the film. The secret was a difficult burden for a teenage boy, but his father must have figured that Oded would be more careful about what he said if he understood some of what was at stake.