Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-mossad"

The Story of a Spy and the Man Who Wrote About Him

by

Wesley Britton


"Eli Cohen was no James Bond, yet his swift intelligence, retentive mind, language ability, and other special attributes enabled him to penetrate the highest Echelons of the Syrian government in the mid-1960’s as an agent of Israel’s Mossad.
"Establishing himself as an expatriate from Argentina, Cohen (alias Kamal Amin Taabet) succeeded in rapidly winning friends in high places, and during his nearly four years as a spy managed to send a steady flow of information back to Israel. All in all this is a story of real life espionage more fascinating than any fictional counter part."
– Maurice Cohen


Twists, turns, surprises, and sharp curves don't just happen in espionage. They can happen when an author writes about espionage, especially the real thing.

For example, back in 2006, I was left with the task of assembling and completing the autobiography of former Mossad operative Maurice Cohen, including his memories of his famous brother, Eli Cohen, the spy hung in Damascus on May 18, 1965.

Back then, I quickly came to learn the stories of Eliyahu Ben-Shaul Cohen and Maurice Cohen, in many ways, are very representative of the lives of the Jewish populations in Syria, Egypt, and Israel throughout the 20th century. So when I took over the task of completing Maurice's work as I had promised him before his death on December 1, 2006, I found myself needing to research so much history, geopolitics, religion and culture in the personal lives of the Cohens from 1914 to 1965, from the family fleeing Allepo, Syria through their years in Egypt before being exiled to Israel just as the new country was being formed. Then Eli Cohen went undercover in Damascus before his execution by hanging in 1965.

I had come to the saga of Eli Cohen by way of all the research I had done for my second book, Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film (Praeger Pub: 2005). I had wanted to find anything I could about every spy movie ever made in English. A congenial video store owner in Dallas, Texas handed me a copy of The Impossible Spy. TIS was a bio-pic of Eli Cohen produced by Harvey Chertok for HBO and the BBC in 1987.

As I was about to do my second presentation at the International Spy Museum to promote Beyond Bond, the director asked if there was some film I could suggest with a historical bent for a screening after my presentation.

Quickly, I recommended The Impossible Spy.

On the night of the program, I learned the museum had not only booked The Impossible Spy, they had invited its producer, Harvey Chertok, to join me on stage. That night started a friendship that continues to this very day. Just talked to Harvey last week.

The next event in my Eli Cohen story occurred the weekend of October 8 and 9, 2006. A group of us gathered at the home of Helene Fragman-Abramson in Princeton, NJ, to discuss the projected Maurice Cohen autobiography. I gathered I had been invited because of my association with Harvey and the fact I was a published author with two books under my belt.

In the months to come, most of the team fell off the project for one reason or another until Maurice's death in December 2006 when everything, all his files, all his research came to me. For a short time, Helene Fragman Abramson contributed a ton of research to the project and connected with Avraham Cohen, Eli's youngest brother. From that point forward I assembled my Eli Cohen Files with guidance from Avraham.

In the end, I knew I didn't have enough for a book, so I posted a series of 4 articles at my spywise.net website:

http://www.spywise.net/cohenFiles.htm...

At the same site, you can read all about The Impossible Spy at:
http://www.spywise.net/impossibleSpy....

To this day, my Eli Cohen Files remain the most substantial resource on the Eli Cohen story anywhere on the net.

Now--

I told you all those stories so I could tell you this one:

Once a year or so after the publication of the Cohen Files, one film producer or another would contact me to ask about licensing the rights to my articles. I was amenable, even with the producer who wanted to buy the rights for two years for 99 cents. 99 cents! Well, not worth the effort and best I could tell, all the producers who contacted me weren't able to move their projects forward for whatever reasons. Not until this year when the Netflix mini-series came out, The Spy, and I had no involvement with that whatsoever.

That was until Monday of last week.

I got a request for an interview for a TV Documentary for Al Jazeera Media Network. Producer Ashraf Mashharawi arranged for a film crew to drive up from Washington D.C. to come to my house on Friday, Jan. 4 to conduct the interview at 1:00. That gave me time to reread my Cohen material that I hadn't looked at in years.

Truth be told, I impressed myself. I did all that? All that research? Impressive, even if I say so myself. But I don't say so myself. Apparently it impressed Ashraf Mashharawi who kept complimenting the depth and detail of my research. He sent me a long list of the questions he wanted me to answer and quite a few confused me. Why those details? Why those specific moments? Oh well, interviewees shouldn't shape interviews. I went through all the questions to be as prepped as I could be.

Then Friday arrived, and the two guys arrived ahead of schedule. Fine, thinks I, I've budgeted the next two hours for this interview. One hour, they had told me, they'd need to set up. One hour for the interview itself. Plenty of time, thinks I, to be free to go pick up my grandson at 3:30. Uh huh.

From 1:00 to 2:00, the two gents rearranged all the furniture in my living room--which wasn't much considering how small my living room is--set up their two cameras, all their lights, attached mics to me, had me sit in a chair before a black background they set up, and we were ready to go.

Not quite.

They kept talking with Ashraf who was in Germany taking micro-managing to new extremes. He kept wanting changes to the lighting as he wanted, and I understood this, everything to be uniform and consistent with everything else he was shooting for his documentary. He kept calling out for all sorts of technical things I didn't understand but it drug on and on and I was amazed. You'd think this was the digital age and everything could be smoothed over with a few mouse clicks. Nope.

Finally, one of the filmers sat across from me with the questions Ashraf wanted answered and said, "My voice isn't going to be on the film, so please answer everything imbedding the question in your answer." I could do that.

So the interview began, interrupted from time to time when the camera man had to change batteries. An hour interview and they needed to change batteries three times?

Along the way, Ashraf would pipe in with instructions or details he wanted or answers he wanted me to redo. I understood all that. To a point.

Then it was 3:15, then 3:30, and my ride to go get Joey was in my driveway honking to get up and go. And the interview wasn't over. "Just two more questions."

"Then you guys got to go outside and apologize to Ann. You're dragging this on and on, you should take the heat."

I went outside and she told me to just come on and get in her car. "I can't. They got my living room all messed up, they got equipment all over the place they gotta break-down and take out." And they wanted to film some "inserts" of me to, well, insert throughout the interview.

At one point, I said, "This is a lot of work and I hope I'm worth the effort." Ashraf kept saying I was. I noted I have done hundreds of interviews in the past, the interviewer asks an hour worth of questions and only a minute or so is used, only a paragraph or two ends up in the print edition. "Oh no," they told me. "Pretty much most of this will be included. You're the star of the show." Well, they did invest a lot in the filming, in just the trip from D.C. and back alone.

When will I see it, when will any of you get to see it? Not a clue. Not a word. Ashraf doesn't know. He did apologize for ticking Ann off. Her final word: "Those two Arab guys were very good looking. Too young for me, sorry to say."

So she calmed down pretty quickly.

What's the next stage of this saga? Stay tuned--