The Hamilton Spectator

Behind Lens, Israeli Spy Roamed in Plain Sight

By RONEN BERGMAN

On October 8, 1965, the chief of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, presented the country’s prime minister with a plan to assassinate several leading Palestinian militants based in Beirut, Lebanon, with letter bombs.

“It will be a woman doing it,” said the Mossad chief, Meir Amit, according to transcripts of the meeting with the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, seen by The New York Times. The agent would travel to Beirut and slip the bombs into a mailbox there, he said. At a later meeting, Mr. Amit told the prime minister that the woman was a Mossad agent using a Canadian passport who was working as a photographer for a French press agency.

The woman, Sylvia Rafael, was later arrested as a member of a Mossad team that had planned to kill another top Palestinian militant in Norway but shot the wrong man. Ms. Rafael and parts of her life story are widely known, but her work as a press photographer, documenting the unique access she attained in countries where foreigners were not usually welcomed, in secret training camps used by Palestinian militants, as well as to leaders of Arab states and Hollywood stars, had never been publicly revealed.

On March 14, her work was put on display for the first time at the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv after being kept for decades in a locked suitcase in the Mossad archive, in the heart of one of the most protected facilities in Israel. The suitcase contained hundreds of negatives from her years of work for Dalmas, a now defunct French news agency.

Ms. Rafael’s work as a photographer was just a cover but the photographs she took, the curators of the exhibition say, show great talent.

The pictures open a window into the two lives of a woman, as a spy and a photographer.

They include portraits of leaders like President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and his successor, Anwar Sadat. Other images show scenes of flooding in Yemen and social unrest in Djibouti, as well as daily life in countries like Lebanon and Jordan, which would have been off limits for any Israelis, let alone a Mossad agent. They also include pictures of Hollywood stars like Danny Kaye, Yul Brynner, Vanessa Redgrave and Eli Wallach.

“Sylvia was someone special,” said Moti Kfir, who was commander of Mossad’s Clandestine Operations Academy at the time Ms. Rafael was recruited and trained there. She had, he continued, “a remarkable talent for forming relationships with anyone.”

Ilan Schwarz, who was the first to look for the collection, said: “Sylvia’s story fascinated me. She was a woman who went against conventions at a very young age, left her comfort zone, and agreed to sacrifice so much.”

Shortly after Ms. Rafael was arrested in 1973 in Norway, the Mossad acquired her photographs, Mr. Schwarz said. He joined forces with two London-based Israeli art collectors, Tamar Arnon and Eli Zagury, and together they approached the Mossad with a request to make the collection available.

“Not for a moment did I imagine that we would find such a level of photography,” said Ms. Arnon, who curated the exhibit with Mr. Schwarz and Mr. Zagury.

The photographs document the assignments Ms. Rafael worked on from 1965 to 1971. Ms. Rafael, who died in 2005, appears in some. Mr. Kfir said self portraits were a common practice for trying to get pictures of locations or people without arousing suspicion.

Ms. Rafael was born in 1937 in South Africa to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, meaning she was not a Jew under Jewish religious law. However, she developed a strong allegiance with the Jewish people, immigrated to Israel and started working as a teacher. She soon caught the eye of the Mossad, which was on the lookout for potential agents who did not appear to be Israeli. She underwent two years of tough training.

Mr. Kfir said, “She was not scared of anything.”

Sylvia Rafael, a press photographer and Mossad agent, in Yemen in 1967. Below left, a photograph she took of a Fatah youth training camp in Jordan in 1969. Below right, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in 1967.

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