Today, Monday, the Mossad published on the website of the “Israeli Prime Minister’s Office”, for the first time, what came in the last telegram that the Israeli intelligence service received on January 19, 1965 from its famous spy, Eli Cohen, hours before his arrest that day and his execution on May 18 in Damascus.
The telegram, written on a typewriter in French, was also published by several Israeli media on their websites, in which Cohen wrote: “A meeting at the headquarters of the Syrian army at five o’clock with Amin al-Hafiz (the President of the Republic) and senior army officers.” A copy of it was displayed at the opening ceremony of a museum about Cohen. Today, while “its original copy will be kept in the state archives,” Mossad chief Didi Barnea said.
Cohen, born in 1924 in Egypt, worked from 1961 to 1965 as a spy for the Israeli intelligence service in Damascus, impersonating a Syrian immigrant born under the name of Kamel Amin Thabet in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, and was arrested after the protest of the embassies adjacent to his home located at the time in the Embassies neighborhood due to the disruption of their dispatches. . Nevertheless, he told the judge during his trial: “I am not a spy. I am an envoy.”