Isaac Shoshan

Shoshan was born in Aleppo, Syria, as Zaki (Sahoua) Shasho and grew up in one of the city’s poorer Jewish families.[1][5] His father worked as an elementary-school janitor, and Shoshan and his siblings wore inexpensive sandals or shoes passed down from others.[5]

At 13, Shoshan encountered modern Hebrew through an Alliance Israélite schoolteacher who had come from the Land of Israel.[5] The teacher instructed his Arabic-speaking class in Hebrew and told the pupils about kibbutzim and places including Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem.[5] Shoshan recalled that these lessons helped him understand that places he knew from the Bible existed in the contemporary world.[5] He and several friends resolved to leave for the Land of Israel and join a cooperative rather than remain in poverty.[5]

In 1942, aged 18, Shoshan left Aleppo with his friend Tawfiq Jiro and traveled by train to Damascus.[5] They sheltered in a synagogue in Jobar that served Jews making their way to Palestine, before a smuggler led their group across the countryside.[5] During the journey, a Hebrew book fell from an elderly rabbi’s donkey, and Shoshan scrambled in the darkness to retrieve it.[5] The group eventually reached a kibbutz, although Shoshan later said he never knew with certainty which one it was.[5]

Shoshan subsequently lived at Kibbutz Na’an with other Syrian boys, working in the fields while a counselor taught them Hebrew and basic practices unfamiliar to some of those from impoverished families.[5] His later Palmach nickname was “Abu-Sahayek.”[1]

In late 1945 or early 1946, Palmach representatives came to Na’an seeking Arabic speakers, and Shoshan joined the organization’s Arabic Section at a tent encampment at Ein Hahoresh.[5] His Palmach service began in 1943, before his recruitment to the specialist unit.[1] The section brought together Jewish immigrants from Arab countries and Arabic-speaking Jews from Palestine.[5] Its origins lay in a World War II initiative involving British intelligence personnel and Jewish militia leaders, intended to support intelligence gathering and sabotage.[2] The unit was also known as Ha-Shahar, or “The Dawn.”[1][6]

At Ein Hahoresh, members divided their time between agricultural work and training with weapons and explosives.[5] Shimon Somekh instructed them in Islamic practice, while Shoshan learned to replace his Aleppo dialect with the speech of Palestinian Arab workers.[5] The section’s wider preparation included practicing language skills in markets, barbershops, restaurants, and buses, and memorizing passages from the Koran.[6] Its early organization was weak and its training uneven; initially, the unit did not even own a radio, and its operatives could still feel afraid when entering mosques while posing as Muslims.[6]

Shoshan’s early assignments included observing an Arab bus depot in Ramleh and attending a sermon at Al-Aqsa that called for war against Jews.[5] In 1948, he participated in an attempt on the life of Arab guerrilla leader Sheikh Nimr el-Khatib, who was badly wounded and remained out of action for the rest of the war.[1][5]

In February 1948, Shoshan helped prepare a booby-trapped car and drove it into a Haifa garage where an Arab car bomb was believed to be stored.[1][5] He escaped before the explosion destroyed the garage.[5] Later, while undercover in Beirut, he met an elderly Palestinian refugee who said that his two sons, both garage workers, had died in the blast.[5] Shoshan recalled offering the man words of comfort without revealing his own involvement.[5]

In May 1948, during the War of Independence, a Palmach commander instructed Shoshan and Havakuk Cohen to pose as Palestinian Arabs and travel to Lebanon among refugees.[5] Both already possessed Arab identities and papers.[5] As part of Shoshan’s cover, Haganah members staged his arrest and placed him in a detention camp holding Arab fighters and members of armed groups, from which he departed with a refugee convoy.[1] When Arab Liberation Army volunteers challenged the two men on their bus journey, Shoshan said that he was going to check on relatives in Syria and would return to fight; the explanation was accepted.[5]

In Beirut, Shoshan and Havakuk Cohen first stayed with other newcomers and later rented a rooftop room.[5] They concealed equipment delivered by an Israeli boat and opened a kiosk selling soda and school supplies; Shoshan also sometimes drove a taxi.[5] Their communications equipment included a radio antenna disguised as a clothesline.[2] For two years, the agents sent encoded transmissions to headquarters in Tel Aviv concerning Palestinian refugee movements and developments in Lebanon and elsewhere.[2][5]

Operating under the fuller assumed name Abdul Karim Muhammad Sidqi, Shoshan worked with other undercover agents in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.[1] His activities helped establish and consolidate infrastructure for Israeli intelligence in Arab countries.[1] The undercover work also carried personal risks: his relationship with a Lebanese Christian woman endangered the unit.[6]

During a 1948 operation in Beirut, Shoshan located the Aviso Grille, a vessel that had served Hitler, and reported its position.[1][5] An explosives expert arrived by sea and attached mines to its hull.[5] The explosion damaged the ship, but repairs prevented it from sinking.[5] Accounts subsequently attributed the attack to unknown saboteurs or to “anti-Faroukist terrorists.”[5]

In the summer of 1949, Shoshan and Gamliel Cohen approached Jordanian soldiers in Jerusalem’s Old City while maintaining cover as Arab refugees who wished to see their former home.[7] The soldiers brought them to an embankment overlooking the war-damaged Jewish sector, a view the two men found “unutterably beautiful.”[7]

Shoshan and Havakuk Cohen returned to Israel in 1950 after other operatives relieved them in Beirut.[5] Shoshan enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces and became one of the early members of Sayeret Matkal, later serving in Military Intelligence.[1] He subsequently entered the Mossad in the 1960s and served in its Caesarea division.[1] Much of this later intelligence work remained classified.[1]

Shoshan also helped organize the clandestine departure of Jews from Syria.[4] Operation “Blanket” began in 1970 and continued for several years, with Shoshan responsible for overseeing the movement of Jews from Syria into Lebanon.[4] He persuaded a childhood friend from Aleppo to adapt a small ship for carrying people referred to as “students.”[4] Concern that Syrian authorities might discover a Beirut safe house and demand the refugees’ extradition led the organizers to involve the Israeli Navy and arrange rapid evacuations from the Lebanese coast.[4] His later career record also credited him with initiating an operation identified in Hebrew as “מלט,” which brought young Syrian Jews to Israel between 1969 and 1972.[1]

Shoshan was one of the four central operatives whose experiences formed the subject of Matti Friedman’s Spies of No Country.[2] The book follows its protagonists through twenty pivotal months, from January 1948 to August 1949, centering on Haifa and Beirut, cities approximately 80 miles apart.[6] Their Arab Section became a nucleus of the Mossad, linking their early undercover activity to the development of Israel’s intelligence services.[2]

The operatives’ work required them to inhabit identities associated with communities they had left behind.[3] One incident illustrating the demands of maintaining cover involved undercover agents calling for Israel’s destruction in conversation with an Arab man, only to realize afterward that he was Jewish; the account does not identify Shoshan as the speaker.[6]

Shoshan also contributed to an oral-history record of Jewish life in Syria and Lebanon.[8] The University of Haifa’s Herzl Institute interview index lists an interview with him conducted on September 17, 1998, comprising 54 pages, within a broader research project on Syrian and Lebanese Jews.[8]

In 2020, Noam Tapper submitted Shoshan’s candidacy for the Israel Prize for Security, citing his decades of service in the Palmach, Military Intelligence, and the Mossad, as well as his role in the history of immigration to Israel.[1] Shoshan died on December 27, 2020, aged 96.[1] His daughter, Etti Yudan, remembered him as modest and said that even his children did not know all his exploits because they remained secret.[1] A posthumous tribute credited him as one of Sayeret Matkal’s founding figures and emphasized that generations of its fighters had learned from him.[1]

The public record of Shoshan’s wartime operations combines retrospective personal testimony with information about activities that remained secret.[1][5] The account of the Haifa garage explosion, including the subsequent encounter with a refugee who said his sons had been killed, rests on interviews with Shoshan; the victims’ identities were not independently corroborated in that account.[5] The continued classification of much of his later work also limits the detail available for public assessment of his intelligence career.[1]