On October 8, 1965, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, presented the country’s Prime Minister with a plan to assassinate several prominent Palestinian militants based in Beirut, Lebanon, with letter bombs.
“It will be a woman who does itMossad chief Meir Amit said, according to transcripts of the meeting with Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, seen by The New York Times. The agent would travel to Beirut and send the bombs via a mailbox there, he said. In a subsequent meeting, Amit told the Prime Minister that the woman was a Mossad agent with a Canadian passport who worked as a photographer for a French news agency.
The woman, Sylvia Rafael, was later arrested as a member of a Mossad team that had planned to kill another prominent Palestinian militant in Norway, but shot the wrong man. Rafael and part of his life story are widely known, but his work as a press photographerwhich documents the unique access he gained to countries where foreigners were not usually welcome, to 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, his work was exhibited for the first time at the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv after having been stored for decades in a locked suitcase in the Mossad archive. The suitcase contained hundreds of negatives from his years working for Dalmas, a now-defunct French news agency.
Rafael’s work as a photographer was only to mislead, but the photographs she took, say the curators of the exhibition, show great talent.
They include portraits of leaders such as 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. They also include images of Hollywood stars like Danny Kaye, Yul Brynner, Vanessa Redgrave and Eli Wallach.
“Sylvia was someone specialsaid Moti Kfir, who was a commander at the Mossad’s Clandestine Operations Academy when Rafael was recruited and trained there. She had, she continued, “a remarkable talent for building relationships with anyone”.
“Sylvia’s story fascinated me. She was a woman who went against convention at a very young age, stepped out of her comfort zone and agreed to sacrifice a lot.”, said Ilan Schwarz, who was the first to search for the collection.
Shortly after Rafael was arrested in Norway in 1973, the Mossad acquired his photographs, Schwarz said. He teamed up with two London-based Israeli art collectors, Tamar Arnon and Eli Zagury, and together they petitioned the Mossad to make the collection available.
The photographs document the parcels Rafael worked on from 1965 to 1971. Rafael, who died in 2005, appears in some. Kfir said self-portraits were a common practice to try to get pictures of places or people without arousing suspicion.
Rafael was born in 1937 in South Africa to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, meaning she was not Jewish under Jewish religious law. However, she developed a strong loyalty to the Jewish people, she immigrated to Israel and began working as a teacher. He soon came to the attention of Mossad, who were looking for potential agents who did not appear to be Israelis. He underwent two years of hard training.
“I was not afraid of anythingKfir said.
By: Ronen Bergman
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6635405, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-29 21:10:09
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