At the end of the TV series "The Spy", it reads:
"During the Six-Day War, which broke out two years after his death, eucalyptus trees planted by Eli on Syrian bunkers were used as a marker for attack by the Israeli army, and the Golan Heights were taken in two days."
What Israel calls the "Six-Day War" is the Third Middle East War that took place in early June 1967. The outcome of the war is well known to the world — Israel won a decisive victory at a small cost of casualties, the battle ended in 6 days, israel at the end of the "Six-Day War" pushed its troops to less than 31 miles from the Jordanian capital Amman, 38 miles from the Syrian capital Damascus, 69 miles from the Egyptian capital Cairo, occupied the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem, and syria's Golan Heights.
In the "Six-Day War", the fighting in the Golan Heights broke out at the latest, and did not start until June 9 (and the "Six-Day War" began on June 5), from the current public historical data, the Israeli top level once hesitated whether to strike Syria after it had already started war with Egypt and Jordan, and at that time, the international community (whether it was Israel's ally the United States, or the Arab coalition ally the Soviet Union) put a huge ceasefire pressure on the Israeli side, but there is a saying that in the early morning of June 9, The Mossad intercepted telegrams between Egyptian President Nasser and Syrian President Nurdin Attassi – the Syrian side admitted to being unable to withstand the Israeli attack – which determined the Israeli side to "beat the falling water dog", and in the next two days, Israel occupied the Golan Heights, and the "Six-Day War" ended.
The storyline of "Agent Cohen", which is only 6 episodes in total, is not complicated, but if you do not know much about the relevant background, you may soon fall into the quagmire of truth and fiction. Here is another point to add about the impact of the victory in the Six-Day War on Israel , which bridged the tensions between the Ashkenazis and the Sephardic. The so-called Ashkenazi people are European and American Jews, the main population composition at the beginning of the establishment of the State of Israel was the Ashkenazi people, while the Sephardic people were Eastern Jews, because after the establishment of the State of Israel, the situation of the Jews living in the Arab world deteriorated gradually to Israel. With the influx of large numbers of Sephardis, the Israeli resettlement system has turned red lights, and the contradictions between Ashkenazi and Sephardic have become increasingly acute.
Secret Agent Cohen poster
Eli Cohen, a Sephadi native of Egypt, was a Young Man who participated in Operation Goshen to help local Jews move back to Israel. Cohen's wife, Nadia, is also a Sephardic and An Iraqi Jew. So in the first episode, Cohen said that Nadia's boss invited the couple to a party not because they treated Nadia as friends, but simply because their skin color was "brown" and could make the party appear diverse. There are also many details in the play that show the discrimination suffered by The Sephards in Israeli society, such as the Coens who bought household appliances at the mall, but were treated as thieves by the security guards.
However, precisely because Cohen looks like an Arab and grew up in Arab society, he is valued by the Mossad and becomes a spy lurking in Syria.
With the victory of the "Six-Day War", the Israeli side continued to "mythologize" Cohen's spy experience, which eventually made him the greatest spy since the founding of the State of Israel.
About Cohen's public portrait (part 1), Sasha Byron Cohen as Eli Cohen (not related by blood, Sasha is an English Jew who is world-famous for the film Borat)
The eucalyptus trees in the Golan Heights mentioned at the beginning of this article are one of Cohen's "miracles", and to this day, the rows of eucalyptus trees in the Golan Heights occupied by Israel are still remembered, which is the merit of Cohen. Another "miracle" about Cohen is not reflected in the play, but it can also be regarded as a household name in Israel - during the "Six-Day War", two Syrian warplanes were preparing to carry out the mission of bombing Tel Aviv, and the Mossad contacted the pilot by radio, informed their family members in detail, and threatened that if they dared to throw the bomb on Israeli territory, their family members would all be killed, and finally the pilot threw the bomb into the sea. This is thanks to cohen sending all of the Syrian Air Force information back home that year [see Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services]
It should be true to sponsor the Syrian army eucalyptus saplings on the grounds that the Syrian soldiers stood guard in the Golan Heights without shade, but is it in line with military common sense that the Israeli army only relied on eucalyptus trees as a record and took the Golan Heights within two days? Moreover, Cohen was executed on May 18, 1965, two years before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, during which the Syrian Air Force did not recruit new soldiers? And the specific names of those pilots who took off, how was the Israeli side confirmed?
It is clear that there are fictitious traces in the Cohen story that has been publicized by the Israeli side for decades, and the reasons for this are not difficult to guess – they need to cover up the truth and protect Israeli spies who have not yet been discovered. Of course, this is also a psychological warfare carried out by the Mossad.
Cohen (center) in the Golan Heights
When Cohen was captured and tried by the Syrian side, it was a sensational international news, and whether to release Cohen had touched the nerves of many countries. In other words, Cohen was the most well-known spy in Israel before the outbreak of the Six-Day War. But before the Six-Day War, he was known only for playing the Syrian hierarchy and sacrificing his life for the country. It was not until after the "Six-Day War" that his deeds were suddenly deciphered and closely related to the victory of that war. The 1987 TV movie "The Impossible Spy" eventually established Cohen's public image, and thanks to the huge influence of the broadcast platform BBC, the Israeli spy became famous on many of the 20th century spie lists.
The Impossible Spy is the fifth episode of the sixth season of the BBC series Screen Two, which ran between 1985 and 2002, and lasted 1 hour and 36 minutes. The film tells the story of how Cohen was recruited by the Mossad and sent to Syria, where he established contact with a number of senior Syrian officials and continued to send intelligence back home. When he returned to Israel, his wife hoped that he would not take any more risks, and his commander thought that he had given enough information, but Cohen still decided to return to Syria to work. Finally, when he learned that Syria was going to attack an Israeli collective farm (kibbutz), Cohen passed on the information regardless of his personal safety, leading to his arrest.
Poster of The Impossible Spy
The plot of "The Impossible Spy" also appeared in "Agent Cohen", but it was re-enacted, cohen learned during a trip to the Golan Heights that the Syrian army was about to launch an attack on a collective farm in Israel, and he passed on the information regardless of his personal safety, but did not lead to arrest.
In Agent Cohen, it is the Israeli hierarchy that demands that Cohen must return to Syria to continue his espionage work, not entirely out of Cohen's own patriotism. The plot inconsistencies with The 1980s' The Impossible Spy are due to the fact that more archives about Cohen have been declassified over the decades, or that Cohen's story has been enriched over the decades.
Here we need to mention one person, Amin Hafez, the real power figure in Syria at that time. Hafez allegedly regarded Cohen as a close confidant and wanted him to be Syria's deputy defense minister, which led the Israeli hierarchy to believe that Cohen had to lurk back. But if this story holds true, then many of the things surrounding Cohen don't make sense. Assuming that Cohen can really become the deputy minister of defense of Syria, then his value is incalculable, from the general logic of intelligence work, such an important chess piece can never be easily exposed, and the Mossad side still requires him to send a daily morning and evening newspaper to contact, is not waiting for the Syrians to find?
After Hafez later fled the country after his downfall, he insisted that he had never intended to make Cohen deputy defense minister, and declared that he did not know Cohen at all. Of course, this statement can only be believed half way. Hafez said that he was still in the Soviet Union in 1962, implying that when Cohen sneaked into Syria, he was not in Syria at all, but it is undeniable that Hafez did serve as a military attaché of the Syrian embassy in Argentina in 1961, and Cohen, as Kamal, began his espionage work in 1961 in the Middle East community of buenos Aires, Argentina.
The historical Cohen and the Cohen in the film and television drama may always be two people, but even if "Agent Cohen" is all fictional, the two-sided life passage about spy Cohen in the play is still worth watching. The show's creator, Gideon Raff, is the director of the Israeli and American versions of Homeland Security, and his grasp of the psychological changes of the agents has reached the point of pure fire.
I especially like the two screens in the play, one is the passage where he and his wife are separated by thousands of miles, and at the same time, they open the refrigerator and take out butter to coat bread, and the other is the Coen brothers who are thousands of miles apart to comment on the football game through the airwaves. A spy is in an enemy camp, lonely, frightened, and fearful, inadvertently appearing on the screen.