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Munich, the Mossad, and a Spy Named Sylvia

Review: Ram Oren and Moti Kfir’s ‘Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy’

An Israeli worker displays a photo of former Mossad agent Sylvia Rafael in a memorial book in the Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center at Gliliot Junction near Tel Aviv
An Israeli worker displays a photo of former Mossad agent Sylvia Rafael in a memorial book in the Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center at Gliliot Junction near Tel Aviv / AP
December 21, 2014

This biography, apparently the first ever published about a female Mossad agent, starts out as a derring-do tale of a beautiful and dedicated young woman prepared to operate behind enemy lines, whatever the risk.

Sylvia Rafael, however, become trapped behind her own lines—bereft of love and family life for years because of her undercover work.

In the end, the substitute family which provided her with identity and purpose during those lonely years—the Mossad itself—failed her in a botched operation in 1973 which led to her imprisonment.

This book, co-authored by the former Mossad official who recruited Rafael, Moti Kfir, (and by Ram Oren) is discreet about the operations Rafael was involved in, except for the final one. It is an admiring and incomplete portrait, and ultimately a melancholy one.

Born in South Africa to a Christian mother and a Jewish father who had lost his family in the Holocaust, Rafael identified passionately with the Jewish people. In 1959, at the age of 22, she moved to Israel. She worked for some time as an English teacher, while trying to find more meaningful employment. But the work found her. Her roommate’s boyfriend, unknown to either of the young women, worked for the Mossad. Struck by Rafael’s poise, intelligence and spirit—as well as her foreign passport—he told his superior "she could be right for us".

Rafael was duly invited to a meeting in a coffee shop and, after a brief conversation, was offered a job in "security". After psychological evaluation, she was subjected to a series of exercises that tested her courage, wit, and initiative. Her instructors detected an innate ability to ingratiate herself with strangers and get them to open up about themselves. After her acceptance as a field agent, she assumed the identity of a Canadian photojournalist. Trained by a top Israeli photographer, she became good enough to be hired by a reputable photo agency in Paris, which provided her a perfect base.

Although the book briefly describes a couple of her forays abroad, the authors are vague about her operational history, presumably for security reasons. The one mission that is discussed at some length—the facts would become a matter of public record at her trial—is her last one, which took place in Norway, where Rafael was part of a surveillance detail. A hastily assembled Mossad team had been dispatched to the remote resort of Lillehammer in the belief that they would find Ali Hassan Salameh, commander of Black September, the Palestinian group that had carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the year before. In a bizarre series of operational errors—totally antithetical to the Mossad’s reputation for precision—the wrong man was identified.

A member of the surveillance team heard him speaking French. This gave several members of the team pause, including Rafael, who noted that they had not been told that Salameh spoke French. The main problem, however, was that the photograph of him given them for identification was unclear. In addition, the absence of bodyguards for a man who was at the top of the Mossad’s hit-list was puzzling. "This may well be a case of mistaken identity," Rafael remarked at the time.

However, the team leader, who shared the doubts, injured his leg and the replacement who arrived insisted on continuing the mission. The assassination was carried out on a Lillehammer street in the night. The victim was identified by police as a local waiter, Moroccan-born Ahmad Boushiki. In the haste to get to Salameh, no escape plan had been prepared and most members of the Mossad team, including Rafael, were arrested before they could make it back to Oslo Airport.

Rafael had been contemplating leaving the Mossad for some time, so that she need no longer have to pretend to be someone else. In her late 30s, she still hoped to find someone with whom to share her life. The Lillehammer episode was a traumatic crisis of faith. The organization with which she had totally identified for more than a decade had failed her and her colleagues in an inexplicably amateurish fashion and she no longer had even that loyalty to lean on.

The only moments of comfort were the visits of attorney Annaeus Schjodt, one of Norway’s top lawyers, who was hired by Israel to represent the detainees. Sylvia was sentenced to five and a half years as an accessory to murder. Schjodt would continue to visit her in the comfortable women’s prison to which she was sent. A personal relationship developed between them, even though Schjodt was more than 20 years older and married. Rafael was released after two years and flew back to Israel. Shortly afterwards, she married Schjodt, who had divorced his wife. They settled in Oslo until Schjodt’s retirement and then moved to South Africa to be near her family. Rafael died there in 2005, at age 68. At her request, she was buried in an Israeli kibbutz.

The authors note that they had in some cases permitted themselves "to exercise their literary imagination", which is evident in the extended dialogue that they could not possibly have had records of. The book’s credibility is also damaged by the stock patriotic dialogues placed in the mouths of both Israeli and Palestinian characters. But the tale it tells is remarkable, just like its heroine.

Published under: Book reviews