Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

213 Pages·2019·2.97 MB·English

by  Matti Friedman

SPIES OF NO COUNTRY
Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel
Matti Friedman
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2019
The tropes of espionage—duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestinity, secret
knowledge, the bluff, the double bluff, unknowingness, bafflement, shifting
identity—are no more than the tropes of the life that every human being lives.
—W B
ILLIAM OYD
CONTENTS
The Spies
Preface
PART I: HAIFA
1. The Scout
2. At Camp
3. The Garage
4. The Watcher (1)
5. Tiger
6. Isaac
7. Operation Starling
8. Cedar
9. The Watcher (2)
PART II: BEIRUT
10. Kim
11. Exceptional Opportunities
12. The Fall of Israel
13. The Three Moons Kiosk
14. Casino Méditerranée
15. Hitler’s Yacht
16. The Saboteur
17. The Gallows
18. The Jewish State
19. Georgette
20. The Redhead
21. Home
Epilogue
Notes on Sources
Acknowledgments
THE SPIES
Gamliel Cohen
Alias: Yussef
Born: Damascus, Syria
Age in January 1948: 25
Isaac Shoshan
Alias: Abdul Karim
Born: Aleppo, Syria
Age: 23
Havakuk Cohen
Alias: Ibrahim
Born: Yemen
Age: 20
Yakuba Cohen
Alias: Jamil
Born: Jerusalem, British Palestine
Age: 23
PREFACE
Of the four spies at the center of this story, only Isaac is still alive. The
bespectacled fighter from the alleyways of Aleppo is ninety-three as I write these
lines. The suggestion that I meet him came from another pensioner of Israel’s
intelligence services, a man I knew from working on a different story. I went to
see Isaac not because I’d heard of him or of the little outfit to which he’d
belonged at the creation of the state, and not because I planned to write this
book, but only because I’ve learned over years as a reporter that time spent with
old spies is never time wasted.
I ended up spending many hours over several years speaking with him against
a backdrop of olive-green wall tiles in his kitchen, which is on the seventh floor
of an apartment block in the metropolitan sprawl south of Tel Aviv. Sometimes
he crossed slowly to the stove and brewed black coffee in a little metal pot with
a long handle, like the ones they used at the famous campfires. His words were
measured; chattiness wasn’t a quality these men respected. His memory was a
sharp blade. Sometimes it seemed as if the Independence War of 1948 had just
ended or was still on.
He laughed more than you’d expect, every few sentences, a deep heh-heh-heh
accompanied by the shaking of a head that was now mostly ears, nose, and grin.
What he laughed at was seldom funny. He wasn’t making light of things but
expressing wonder at all he’d seen. As he spoke, there were flashes of Isaac as
he must have been in those days—watchful, quick, and hungry. He spoke for the
others, the ones who survived to old age and died in bed, and the ones who set
off with their thin disguises into the storm of events seventy years ago and
vanished.
When Isaac first arrived at a vegetable market in Tel Aviv in 1942, a
penniless Arabic-speaking teenager squatting on the ground with a crate of
peppers, he could have remained there. Many people have arrived at such a
market and stayed forever, like my great-grandfather, who sold oranges from a
cart on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But that didn’t happen to Isaac. A
freak tide lifted him up and carried him away. He could have ended his life at