![]() ![]() And a month before Ba’athists took power in Syria, another group of Ba’athists took over Iraq. General Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1970 to 2000, was a Ba’athist, as is his son, Bashar al-Assad, who became president after his father’s death. The Ba’athists were a group of primarily secular Arab nationalists who opposed colonialism and promoted socialism, militarism and Arab unification. In real life, the group of radicals took power in Syria in March 1963. The Spy shows Cohen growing close to Hafez and a group of Syrian conspirators known as the Ba’ath Party, who are preparing to seize power in the country. Hafez, who became Syria’s president, accepted expensive gifts from his apparently wealthy friend, invited him to banquets and even prepared to appoint him as Syria’s defense minister, all the while inadvertently providing the Israeli agent a level of access to the Syrian regime that the Mossad could only have dreamed of. Later, after Hafez returned to Syria and toppled the ruling government with a group of Ba’athist conspirators in 1963, Cohen, by that point in Syria, reaped the benefits. The real Amin al-Hafez really did befriend Cohen in South America. In the show, Cohen skillfully establishes himself within the Syrian community in Buenos Aires, eventually meeting Colonel Amin al-Hafez (Waleed Zuaiter), a high profile Syrian officer put out to pasture in Argentina as Syria’s military attaché. ![]() And as Cohen burrowed deeper and deeper into Syria’s political and military hierarchy, he continuously sent intelligence updates back to his handlers across the border, either tapping out dispatches in Morse code, or smuggling documents out through Europe. His new friends invited him to tour Syrian military bases and, as depicted in The Spy, to extensively visit the regime’s fortifications on the Golan Heights, a strategically valuable piece of land that Israeli would later seize in the 1967 Six-Day War. Those connections enabled Cohen to collect more than political gossip. ![]() There, he carried on a high-powered social life, holding parties at his home that were attended by high-ranking Syrian officials, whom he was able to subtly ply for information. He succeeded in gaining the friendship of many influential members of Syria’s community abroad before traveling to Damascus in early 1962 carrying their invaluable letters of introduction. In South America, Cohen (or Thabet, as his Syrian associates would have known him) posed as a wealthy businessman. The remarkable part, of course, is that it really happened. The series depicts Eli Cohen’s transformation from office clerk to Mossad operative to Syrian political power-player in a daring tale of espionage that plays more like something out of a James Bond thriller than a history book. ![]() Sacha Baron Cohen, best known for comedic roles in Borat (2006) and the Emmy-nominated Showtime series he created, Who is America?, is cast against type as the legendary secret agent. 6 from creator Gideon Raff, whose movie The Red Sea Diving Resort premiered on the streaming service in July. And among its agents, there are few, if any, that have achieved the status of Eli Cohen, who in the mid-1960s posed as a wealthy Arab businessman for years in order to infiltrate the highest levels of the Syrian regime and send invaluable intelligence back to his Israeli handlers.Ĭohen’s story is recounted in The Spy, a six-episode Netflix miniseries premiering Sept. Around the world, there are few spy agencies that inspire the level of intrigue that Israel’s Mossad does. ![]()
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