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Yossi Melman on Israel’s Most Famous Spy: What we learn from the Eli Cohen files

star 0 History Israel

JL;DR SUMMARY The episode discusses the remarkable life and espionage activities of Eli Cohen, an Egyptian Jew who became an iconic Israeli spy in Syria, and the recent acquisition of his intelligence files by Israel. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

MossadIsraeli IntelligenceSyriaMiddle Eastern PoliticsEli CohenEspionageIntelligence FailuresHuman IntelligenceBa'ath PartyThe Spy

Places mentioned

Damascus, Daraa, Syria
"With the fall of the Assad regime, and with a new government in Damascus looking to curry favor with the United States and the West, earlier this week, the Syrians handed over some 2,500 documents from Syria's Eli Cohen file."
Egypt
"Cohen played an Israeli spy, a Jewish immigrant from Egypt who, once in Israel and recruited by the Mossad, was trained and assumed the identity of Kamel Amin Thabet, a wealthy Arab businessman who, having eventually moved to Damascus..."
Northern District, Israel
"There are streets and institutions and many children, and even, in the Golan, a town in Israel, named after Eli Cohen."
Tel Aviv District, Israel
"While he was certain that he can perform his duties on behalf of the Israeli intelligence, he started with simplicity. He started with simple missions like going on the Golan Heights, at that time, before 1967, the Golan Heights were part of..."
Argentina
"For example, he bought a very expensive... A wristwatch, a Swiss wristwatch, in order to impress his interlockers when he would meet them in Syria. So after Argentina, he went via Lebanon and then drove a car from Beirut to Damascus."
United States
"With the fall of the Assad regime, and with a new government in Damascus looking to curry favor with the United States and the West, earlier this week, the Syrians handed over some 2,500 documents from Syria's Eli Cohen file."
Germany
"One version is that the Soviet Union and the East Germany, the Stasi, the notorious East Germany security service, they brought a new detecting equipment to Syria."

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This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 52276
Cairo Source ID 16
Retrieved 2025-05-23 05:30:26 UTC
Curated 2025-05-23 06:04:34 UTC