On October 8, 1965, the head of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, presented to the country's prime minister a plan to assassinate
several
prominent Beirut-based Palestinian militants with letter bombs.
"It will be a woman who does it," Mossad chief Meir Amit said, according to transcripts of the meeting with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol seen by
The New York Times
.
President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt greeting his Algerian counterpart, Houari Boumédiène, in Egypt, in 1967. (Sylvia Rafael, via Double Exposure via The New York Times)
The agent would travel to Beirut and put the bombs in 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 identity of the woman,
Sylvia Rafael
, and her face, later became known worldwide when she was arrested as a member of a Mossad team that had planned to kill another leading Palestinian militant in Norway, but shot the wrong man.
Eli Wallach and David Niven on the set of the 1969 film "The Brain." (Sylvia Rafael, via Double Exposure via The New York Times)
Rafael and some of his life story are widely known, but her work as a press photographer, documenting the
unique access
she 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 disclosed.
Until now.
On Tuesday, his work will be opened to the public for the first time at the
Isaac Rabin Center in Tel Aviv,
Israel, after having lain for decades in a locked suitcase in the Mossad archive, at the heart of one of the facilities. Israel's most protected.
The suitcase contained
hundreds of negatives and contacts
from his years working for Dalmas, a now-defunct French news agency.
A Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan in 1969. (Sylvia Rafael, via Double Exposure via The New York Times)
Rafael's work as a photographer was nothing more than a
cover
for her espionage activity, but the photographs she took, the exhibition curators say, show
great talent.
The images open a window into the two lives of a woman, as a spy and as a photographer.
They include portraits of regional leaders such as President
Gamal Abdel Nasse
r of Egypt and his successor
Anwar Sadat,
oblivious to the fact that they were being photographed by a Mossad agent.
Other images show scenes of flooding in Yemen and social unrest in Djibouti, as well as daily life in countries like Lebanon and Jordan that would have been off limits to any Israeli, let alone a Mossad agent.
They also include photos of Hollywood stars like
Danny Kaye, Yul Brynner, Vanessa Redgrave and Eli Wallach.
A Fatah youth training camp in Jordan, in 1969. (Sylvia Rafael, via Double Exposure via The New York Times)
"Sylvia was someone special," said Moti Kfir, who was a commander at the Mossad's Clandestine Operations Academy when Rafael was recruited and trained there.
He had, he continued, "an extraordinary talent for building relationships with anyone, and giving her or him the feeling that they were his or her best friends."
Fascination
"Sylvia's story fascinated me," said Ilan Schwarz, one of the exhibition's curators who first sought out the collection.
"She was a woman who went against convention from a very young age, stepped out of her comfort zone and
agreed to sacrifice so much
."
He added: "When I learned that he had been using the cover of a photographer in war zones in Africa and the Middle East, I believed that if we could locate these photographs, they could have great artistic value
.
"
Shortly after Rafael was arrested in 1973 in Norway, the Mossad acquired her photographs, according to Schwarz.
She joined forces with two London-based Israeli art collectors,
Tamar Arnon and Eli Zagury, and together they turned to Mossad with a request to make the collection available to them.
"I never for a moment imagined that we would find such a level of photography and such talent, until we opened the suitcase," said Arnon, curating the exhibition with Schwarz and Zagury.
The photographs document the commissions Rafael worked on between 1965 and 1971.
Some of the photos remain classified
top secret
by the Mossad and have been kept out of the exhibition.
Rafael, who died in 2005, appears in some of the photos.
Kfir, the intelligence officer, said such self-portraits were a common practice for intelligence agents trying to get pictures of places or people
without arousing suspicion.
Collections of works by deceased artists are often exhibited by relatives or people interested in profiting from their work, Arnon explained.
"Here, however, due to secrecy and sensitivity, this collection, which was created thanks to clandestine activity, had remained forgotten until now," he added.
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, immigrated to Israel, and began working as a teacher.
He soon came to the attention of Mossad, who were constantly looking for
potential agents
who did not appear to be Israelis.
"One of the instructors at the Mossad academy proudly told us about a new girlfriend of his who had a roommate in Tel Aviv who might interest us," says Kfir.
That roommate was Rafael, who was successfully recruited and underwent two years of hard training as an agent.
"It was important to her to show us that she, who had not grown up in Israel, who was not Jewish, would be more successful," he said.
"And he wasn't afraid of anything. There was no mission that he expressed fear or refused to carry out."
During his training, which also included the use of cameras, the instructors noticed his talent.
"And then the idea of creating a cover for her as a photographer started coming up," Kfir said.
"It's a perfect cover because it gives the agent journalist credentials and an excellent explanation of why he needs to enter countries that are very difficult to get a visa for."
Rafael took an intensive photography course with one of Israel's leading press photographers.
According to Kfir, a European Jewish businessman sent his portfolio with a warm recommendation to the Dalmas agency in Paris to accept "
emerging talent
" as work experience.
"And that's how the cover-up story took shape," Kfir said.
"She lives in Paris, and from there she goes on missions in Djibouti, Jordan or Lebanon."
Rafael managed to get close to
King Hussein
of Jordan, who invited her to his house to photograph him and his family, including Prince Abdullah, the current king.
The Mossad did not allow the publication of the photos of that trip, but it did allow the publication of photos documenting Nasser and Sadat, proof of how close the Mossad was to the two Egyptian leaders, who feared for years that Israel would try to murder them.
Rafael was also the Mossad agent who penetrated the Fatah training camps, the movement founded by
Yasser Arafat
that later merged with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and which in 1965 launched a campaign of attacks against Israel and its citizens. Israelis around the world.
High officials of the organization were the target of the letter bomb attack that the head of the Mossad requested in 1965, but which was ultimately unsuccessful.
One of the photos from his visit to the camp is on display at the Tel Aviv exhibition.
It shows "the burning look in the eyes of the boys who mobilized at Yasser Arafat's call," Schwarz said.
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