http://washingtonpost.com./wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/04/042l-010400-idx.html
Could a Dead Israeli Spy Influence the Talks?
By Lee Hockstader,
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 4, 2000; Page A11
HERZILIYYA, Israel - When Syria strung up Eli Cohen
in a Damascus public square 35 years ago, his wife
Nadia mourned his death--and so did all of Israel.
The handsome superspy--the man who had penetrated
Syria's military establishment, sponged up its
secrets and charmed the Syrian president--was
hanging by a noose, dead, but the myth of Eli
Cohen was just being born.
Cohen became an overnight Israeli legend, his name
emblazoned on street signs, parks and synagogues.
With his fame a cause was born--bringing home
Cohen's remains. For three deades, Israel and
Nadia Cohen have pleaded with the Syrians to
return Cohen's body, to no avail.
Now, though, the issue has assumed more than
symbolic importance. In the Israeli-Syrian peace
talks that opened Monday in Shepherdstown, W. Va.,
Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said he is angling
for the return of Cohen's body as a gesture to the
Israeli public of Syria's desire to be a partner
in peace.
[....]
Analysts here say Syria, too, could have a
dramatic effect on the Israeli public by handing
over Cohen's remains. If anything, they say, the
need today is even greater because Barak has
promised that any peace deal will be submitted to
Israeli public opinion in a referendum. And thus
far, Israeli opinion is deeply divided about
making peace with Damascus, particularly over the
idea of giving back the Golan Heights, the
wind-swept plateau Israel captured from the
Syrians in the 1967 Middle East war.
[.....]
That Syria has so far been reluctant to discuss
the question of Cohen's remains is seen here as a
measure of the damage he did as a secret agent.
Like Chaara's refusal to shake hands before the
cameras, it is also taken by Israelis as a sign of
Syria's reluctance to change the atmospherics and
build confidence for peace.
Outgoing and affable, Cohen was a native Arabic
speaker who grew up in Egypt, the son of Syrian
Jews. He was active in Zionist underground
movements in Cairo and finally fled Egypt for
Israel in 1956, the year of the Suez war. He spent
barely four years in Israel, just long enough to
marry and learn Hebrew, before he joined the
Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, and was sent to
Argentina.
In Buenos Aires, Cohen assumed a new
identity--Kamal Amin Taabet, a wealthy Syrian
merchant. He courted Syrian businessmen, making
contacts and friends, then moved on to Damascus in
late 1961. With remarkable speed, he penetrated
ruling circles, befriended army generals and
hosted parties attended by the Damascus elite.
At a time of rising Middle East tensions, the
intelligence Cohen gathered was a treasure trove
of insider information, all tapped out in Morse
code for transmittal to Israel.
According to lore, Cohen's espionage was critical
to Israel's capture of the Golan Heights in 1967.
In addition to providing detailed information
about the strength and location of Syria's forces
in the Golan, he is said to have persuaded the
Syrians to plant eucalyptus trees around their
bunkers and bases, thus pinpointing them for
Israeli bombers and artillery.
The Syrians caught Cohen in 1965. After torture
and a summary trial, he was hanged before a
cheering crowd. He was 40 years old. A blurred
photograph of his body dangling from a rope
flashed around the world. By the end of the day,
even his wife, at home near Tel Aviv with three
small children, had seen it.
The country's yearning for the return of its hero,
and Nadia Cohen's yearning for the return of her
husband, have overlapped over the years, but in
different forms. Nadia Cohen is 64 and has lived
more than half her life as a widow. But even now,
as she speaks of Eli and their brief, troubled
marriage, she fingers a yellow tissue and dabs at
her eyes.
She married Eli barely a year before he left
Israel to assume a covert life, about which she
knew almost nothing before his capture. Their
married life was hard. Nadia bore three children
in six years, but saw her husband only rarely. On
his last, brief trip home, just months before he
was captured, the couple argued and felt the
anxiety of their distance acutely.
"The children were with me; I had no one to help
me. He understood how hard it was," she said in an
interview at her home in Herziliyya. "Each time he
was home, there'd be one less smile, and I'd be
very nervous. Not everything was about flowers and
kisses and hugs. There were a lot of tears and
difficulties."
Nadia Cohen's struggle has been to cherish the
private memory of a man whose name has been
expropriated by an entire nation. She has never
remarried and still wears her wedding band. She
has attended countless memorial services for her
husband but has never been able to mourn at his
grave. She yearns to do that, to hear one last
memorial service at a grave containing his
remains.
"I'd like them to sing a [patriotic] song of the
Land of Israel," she said. "I'd prefer not to hear
the prayer of the dead again.
"For 35 years I've been accompanying him, and the
[public adulation] has never diminished," she
said. "It's hard for us. I'm the wife of the hero,
and they're the kids of the hero. But my pain is
real pain, and the kids don't even remember him."
(c) Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company
