Operative 88

By K.R.J.

THE SHATTERED SILENCE by Zwy Aldouby and Jerrold Ballinger. 453 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $7.95.

Early in 1962, a mustached man of 37 arrived in Damascus using the name Kamal Amin Taabet. He carried an Argentine passport and claimed to be a Lebanese of Syrian descent returning from an expatriate period in Buenos Aires. Taabet set up as an exporter of furniture and tapestries and managed to make a wide range of friends in the business community, in the army and in the ruling Baath party. Quite innocently, those friends kept him posted on the inside details of everything from Syria's perennial coups d'etat to the fortifications on the Golan Heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

Taabet also became an intimate of President Amin al-Hafez, and at the beginning of 1965 was about to be nominated Deputy Minister of Defense. Then, early one January morning, Taabet was arrested by Syrian security officers and exposed as an Israeli agent, a Jew named Eliahu ben Shaul Cohen. Cohen was a gifted linguist who had grown up in Alexandria and learned to impersonate an Arab brilliantly. His arrest ended one of the most audacious careers in the history of espionage.

For more than two years, Cohen, who was known as Operative 88 to his superiors in Tel Aviv, had been sending coded intelligence reports almost daily on a clandestine transmitter. He had carefully picked a location in the diplomatic quarter of Damascus, across the street from the general staff headquarters, where his short-wave signal would be lost among those of foreign embassies and the Syrians themselves.

Vexations and Rewards. He was caught only because Syrian officials ordered a halt to all broadcasting to check some new Soviet equipment; the diplomatic corps complied, but Cohen's lone signal persisted, leading security agents directly to his door. He was tortured, tried for espionage by a military court, convicted and hanged on May 19, 1965, before a crowd of more than 10,000 Damascenes in Marjeh Square.

Zwy Aldouby, an Israeli journalist now living in the U.S., has collaborated with the American writer Jerrold Ballinger in a detailed reconstruction of Cohen's fantastic life and death. Operative 88 emerges as a far more human figure than the spies in the most sophisticated fiction; along with a tale of intrigue the book presents the emotional vexations and rewards of practicing the world's most dangerous profession. In Damascus, Cohen was isolated from family, friends and countrymen. During a brief visit to Israel shortly before his arrest, he told his wife: "I will soon be able to build a villa and stop traveling."

-K.R.J.

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