His work bored him and he attempted to join the Mossad, but he was offended when the Mossad rejected him, and he resigned from military counter-intelligence. The Israel Defense Forces recruited him in 1957 and placed him in military intelligence, where he became a counter-intelligence analyst. He emigrated to Israel with the assistance of the Jewish Agency. įollowing state-sponsored anti-Semitic attacks on its Jewish communities, many of them fled or were expelled, and Cohen was forced to leave the country in December 1956. Cohen had aided the unit and was implicated, but they found no link between him and the perpetrators. Egyptian authorities uncovered the spy ring and sentenced two of the members to death. The unit bombed unoccupied American and British installations, expecting that this would be considered the work of Egyptians. Israel's secret police recruited a sabotage unit of Jewish Egyptian citizens in 1955 which attempted to undermine Egypt's relationships with western powers in the " Lavon Affair". He took part in various Israeli covert operations in the country during the 1950s, although the Egyptian government could never prove his involvement in Operation Goshen, an Israeli operation to smuggle Egyptian Jews out of the country and resettle them in Israel due to increasing hostility in Egypt. Prior to the Egyptian revolution of 1952, Cohen was arrested and interrogated over his Zionist activities.
His parents and three brothers left for Israel in 1949, but he remained to finish a degree in electronics and coordinate Jewish and Zionist activities. A devout Jew, Cohen wore tefillin during prayer, in his youth he planned of becoming a Rabbi with the backup of Moise Ventura (1893-1978), Chief Rabbi of Alexandria but the yeshiva closed down.
His father had moved there from Aleppo in 1914. Syrian counterintelligence eventually uncovered the spy conspiracy and convicted Cohen under pre-war martial law, sentencing him to death and hanging him publicly in 1965.Ĭohen was born in 1924 in Alexandria, Egypt to a devout Mizrahi Jewish and Zionist family. He is best known for his espionage work in 1961–65 in Syria, where he developed close relationships with the Syrian political and military hierarchy.
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