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Refaat Ali Sleeman Al-Gammal (July 1, 1927 – 1981), known as Raafat Al-Haggan in Egypt and as Jack Bitton in Israel, was an Egyptian spy who spent 20 years performing clandestine operations in Israel. Most information about him is still confidential.
According to the Egyptian intelligence service, he moved to Israel as an Egyptian Intelligence asset in 1954. 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.
According to Israel, the information published by Egyptian intelligence is pure fiction. However, after pressure from the Israeli press, the Mosaad said that there was an active and well-placed agent, never suspecteding Jack Bitton.
The Israeli press then discovered Bitton's past. An Israeli newspaper wrote that Jack Bitton was an Egyptian Jew born in El Mansoura in 1919. He Arrived in Israel in 1955 then left it for the last time in 1973, after developing friendships with prominant Israelis such as Golda_Meir and Moshe_Dayan.
His Early Life
Al-Gammal was born in the city Damietta in the Arab Republic of Egypt on July 1st, 1927. His father was a coalminer 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, he was a careless student who never cared much for his studies, so his family decided to enroll 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 at a tourism company, later moving to the USA without a Visa or 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 job nor identification, Al-Gammal looked to the black market to get identification in 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 Elgamal" 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 and his whole story and how he had merged with the Israelis.
Working For The Egyptian Intelligence Agency
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 Intelligence Agency with a new identity. After Al-Gammal accepted this role, he started an extensive long training where he learnt the goals of the revolution, Economics and the success secrets of multi-national firms in addition to the habits, behaviour, history and religion of Jews. He also learnt how to separate between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardi Jews then he learnt how to fight, and to take photos with very subtle devices. He also learnt about the radio, Intelligence Agencies and how to make bombs. And that's how Refaat ElGamal has ended and Jack Bitton was born on (August 23, 1919) as an Ashkenazi Jew from a french father and an italian mother, Jack then moved to live in Alexandria in a neighbourhood mainly inhabited by the Jews then he got a decent job in an insurance company and becamse close to the jews until he became one of them.