Refaat Al-Gammal - Misplaced Pages

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Refaat Al-Gammal
Refaat Al-Gammal
Born	(1927-07-01)July 1, 1927 Damietta, Egypt
Died	January 30, 1982(1982-01-30) (aged 54) Darmstadt, Germany

Refaat Ali Suleiman Al-Gammal (Template:Lang-ar) (July 1, 1927 – January 30, 1982), better known as Raafat Al-Haggan (Template:Lang-ar) in Egypt and as Jack Beton in Israel, was an Egyptian spy who spent 17 years performing clandestine operations in Israel. Most information about him is still confidential.

Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID), claims that he moved to Israel as an Egyptian Intelligence asset in 1956. He was well-known in the Israeli society and was involved in commercial projects. According to the Egyptians, he provided the Egyptian intelligence service with important information while operating a tourism company as a front. Al-Gammal's intelligence concerned, among other things, the Six-Day War and he had an important role in the Yom Kippur War by providing Egypt with detailed engineering data about the Bar Lev Line. Al-Gammal is considered a national hero in Egypt.

A book that describes various spy affairs in Israel claims that the information published by the Egyptian Intelligence is pure fiction and that the Shin Bet knew about Al-Gammal from the early beginning and converted him into a double agent to work for them, and that he provided many disinformation to the Egyptians which lead to the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force in the Six-Day War.

On the other hand, the Egyptians strongly deny that Al-Gammal was a double-agent supporting their story by the important information he provided them.

Early life

Al-Gammal was born in the city Damietta in what was then the Kingdom of Egypt (nowadays the Arab Republic of Egypt) on July 1, 1927. His father was a coal trader and his mother a housewife who spoke English and French in addition to Arabic.

Al-Gammal learned English and French in a private school. In 1936, his father died leaving Al-Gammal's older brother Samy responsible for the family, who moved the family to Cairo. There, after his father's death Al-Gammal's half brother Samy decided to not pay for the high cost of private school, so he enrolled him in the intermediate school of commerce where he was astonished by the British and impressed by their struggle against the onslaught of the Nazis. Al-Gammal became an Anglophile, learning English so fluently as to effect a British accent.

He graduated in 1946 and took a job as an accountant for an oil company working in the Red Sea. Later, He was accused of stealing money from the company and was fired. After that, he moved from one job to another and eventually worked as an assistant for an accounting officer on the ship Horus. He left Egypt for the first time in his life on Horus, travelling to Naples, Genoa, Marseille, Barcelona, Tangier and eventually Liverpool.

There in Liverpool he worked in a tourism company, later moving to the USA without a Visa or a Green Card. His immigration status forced him to move to Canada and then to Germany where the Egyptian Consulate accused him of selling his passport and refused to give him a travel document. He was arrested by the German Police who deported him to Egypt. Back in Egypt, with neither a job nor an identification, Al-Gammal looked to the black market to get an identification with the name of "Ali Mostafa". With these, he went to work for the company managing the Suez Canal.

The revolution of 1952 broke out, and the British realized that the Egyptians sympathized with the new government, and they grew more stringent in fighting counterfeiting. Refaat, worried that he would be discovered, left his job and got a new fake passport from a Swiss journalist, moving from one name to another until he was arrested by a British officer while travelling to Libya in 1953. When he was arrested, he was carrying a British passport but the British officer thought he was Israeli, so he was handed over to the Egyptian Intelligence service which started an investigation of him under the assumption that he was an Israeli operative.

The main charge against Al-Gammal was that he had pretended to be a Jewish officer named "David Artson". At the same time, he was carrying a British passport with the name of "Danial Caldwell". They also found checks signed with the name "Refaat Al-Gammal" with him and that he spoke Arabic fluently. The officer, Hassan Hosny of the secret police, was responsible for the investigation. Al-Gammal confessed his true identity, his whole story and how he had merged with the Israelis.

Working for the EGID

After many attempts on Al-Gammal by the officer Hassan Hosny, Al-Gammal had to choose between two options either jail or working for the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID) with a new identity. After Al-Gammal accepted this role, he started an extensive long training where he learned the goals of the revolution, Economics and the success secrets of multi-national firms in addition to the habits, behavior, history and religion of Jews. He also learned how to tell the Ashkenazi Jews from the Sephardi Jews,how to fight, and to take photos with very subtle devices. He also learned about the radio, Intelligence Agencies and how to make bombs. He assumed the identity of Jacques Beton, an Ashkenazi Jew born 1919 to a French father and an Italian mother. He then moved to live in Alexandria in a neighbourhood mainly inhabited by the Jews and took a decent job in an insurance company. He approached the Jews until he became an important figure among the secret Jewish movements in Egypt.

His role in the Lavon Affair

Main article: Lavon Affair

The Lavon Affair refers to the scandal over a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as Operation Susannah, in which Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt were bombed in the summer of 1954. It became known as the Lavon Affair after the Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who was forced to resign because of the incident, or euphemistically as the Unfortunate Affair (Hebrew: עסק הביש Esek HaBish). Israel admitted responsibility in 2005.

In his diaries, Al-Gammal mentions that he joined Unit 131, which was to carry out the operation, along with many names which later proved to be of great importance, such as Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who almost reached a very subtle government position in Syria. According to the EGID, Al-Gammal had the major role in the discovery and arrest of the unit.

Achievements According to the EGID

Notified Egypt of the time of the Suez Crisis attack, but the authorities never took it seriously.

Notified Egypt of the time of the 1967 attack, but the authorities didn't take it seriously due to other information suggesting the attack will be on Syria.

Developed close friendships with Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizman and David Ben-Gurion.

Supplied Egypt with a lot of information that helped Egypt to achieve "victory" in the Yom Kippur War.

Notified Egypt of the intent of Israel to conduct nuclear experiments and test some modern high-tech weapons while meeting his handler in Milan.

Latter developments

His wife and son Daniel asked for Egyptian citizenship after his death but were denied by the session of the closed court in Cairo probably becouse he was a double agent but the EGID claims that the reason is that the records regarding Al-Gammal's existence while preparing for the operation were removed .

In 2006, his wife came to Egypt and showed up in a show on Dream TV 2 channel talking about Al-Gammal denying the allegations that he was a double-agent, insisting that he was a patriot who devoted his life for his country.

His son claims that he and his mother were told by Mossad agents who visited them in Germany not to go to Israel.

In Popular Culture

The life of Al-Gammal as a spy was written by famous writer Salah Mursi. Because of its invigorating accounts, Egyptian television made a three-season series based on the book. Both book and series were called "Rafat Al-Hajjan". By that time almost the entire Arab world knew of the story and praised for his work and sacrifice.

Trivia

This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. Please relocate any relevant information into other sections or articles. (November 2008)

Al-Gammal loved acting and appeared on 3 successive movies with the then-famous Egyptian Coptic actor Bechara Wakim.

References

"Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1988, Page 39: Issues in the News - Two Can Play". The American Educational Trust. 1988. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
^ The Spies: Israel's Counter-Espionage Wars, Yossi Melman, Eitan Haber

External links

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Arabic

Hebrew

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