Meir Max Bineth

Bineth was born in Hungary in 1917, and his family returned to Germany after World War I.[1] He spent most of his childhood in Cologne.[1] As Nazi rule and antisemitism advanced, he and his parents immigrated illegally to Mandatory Palestine, arriving in May 1935.[1]

After his arrival, Bineth worked at the Tel Aviv port before moving to Kfar Hasidim to study agriculture.[1] There he completed a Haganah military course and participated in the local guard and other Haganah activities.[1] His training also included several industrial fields.[3]

From 1942 to 1945, Bineth worked for Solel Boneh at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan, Iran.[1] Alongside his employment, he studied Persian and completed his formal education through correspondence with England.[1] He also organized Jewish youth groups, taught Hebrew and Jewish history, and prepared young people for immigration to Palestine.[1][2]

Tu BiShvat became a particular focus of his educational work in Abadan.[2] He prepared special pamphlets containing poems, songs, illustrations, and articles about Jewish settlements and the holiday’s significance in building the land.[2][3] He organized small, symbolic tree-planting ceremonies and made the holiday an occasion for welcoming new members into his youth movement.[2][3] After leaving Iran in 1945, he continued corresponding with former students, who described their youth-movement activities and asked for assistance in making aliyah.[2]

In 1947–1948, Bineth served with the Gideonim, the communications personnel of the Mossad LeAliyah Bet, spending most of that period in Italy.[1] His principal task was producing communications equipment for procurement ships and vessels carrying clandestine immigrants.[1] He joined the Intelligence Corps in February 1948.[1]

Beginning in August 1949, he spent several months in Iraq and Iran as a special-assignments officer engaged in covert activity connected with bringing Iraqi Jews to Israel.[1] The Iraqi government sought his extradition over this work and sentenced him to death in absentia.[1]

Bineth arrived in Cairo on April 12, 1952, on an intelligence-gathering assignment with Unit 131.[1] His cover was that of a German businessman representing companies seeking markets in Arab countries.[1] Representation of a German prosthetics manufacturer gave him a channel for establishing connections with Muhammad Naguib, who became Egypt’s president.[1] He was subsequently appointed chief consulting engineer to the Ford agency in Cairo.[1]

Within his first three months in Egypt, Bineth established connections with military and government leaders and entered the local community of German engineers and scientists.[1] Many members of that community were Nazis who had found refuge in Egypt during King Farouk’s rule.[1] A commentary published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs links Bineth’s work to Israeli contacts with German military experts in Cairo, arguing that Egypt’s discovery of those links contributed to its decision not to renew the advisers’ contracts.[4]

Two days before the Egyptian revolution of July 23, 1952, Bineth left for Germany to report to the companies he represented.[1] In August he traveled to Israel and met his handlers.[1] He asked them to remove from Egypt people who knew his identity, especially Marcel Ninio, who served as a liaison between groups in the clandestine network, and made his return conditional on that request being fulfilled.[1]

His wife, Jane, and daughter, Michelle, lived with him in Cairo during the final eight months of his mission.[1][5] The family’s movements through Bonn, Italy, and England formed part of the maintenance of his cover.[5] He continued transmitting intelligence from Cairo during his assignment there in 1952–1954.[5]

In the summer of 1954, Operation Susannah, subsequently associated with the Lavon Affair, used Egyptian Jews recruited by Israeli intelligence to target post offices, American libraries, and a cinema in Egypt. The operation was intended to portray Egypt as unstable and undermine confidence in its ability to control the Suez Canal as Britain considered withdrawing its forces.[6][7]

The exposure of the clandestine network also led Egyptian counterintelligence to Bineth through his connection with Ninio.[1] His daughter recalled that the family left him in late July and that he was captured on August 10, 1954.[5] He was imprisoned on an accusation of transferring money to members of the network.[2][3]

Bineth endured nearly five months of interrogation and torture in a Cairo prison before dying by suicide.[1] He was found dead in his cell on December 21, 1954, aged 37.[2][5] His daughter later recalled that he believed the defendants faced a show trial and chose death before having to testify; she was three years old when he died.[5] Another account places his death one day before he was due to testify.[7]

Bineth was initially buried in Rome, and his remains were transferred to Israel in 1959 for burial at Mount Herzl military cemetery.[1][2] Abraham Dar, who had coordinated Israeli efforts from Paris after the network’s exposure, later recalled traveling to Rome under a false identity as a family representative to attend the burial.[8] He described watching the body being placed in a burial niche in the rain and feeling helpless.[8]

In 1987, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin posthumously promoted Bineth to lieutenant colonel.[1] His daughter Michelle permanently deposited his archive at the National Library of Israel in November 2019.[1]

The archive contains diaries, notes from his work with Jewish youth in Abadan, and correspondence and documents concerning his studies and employment in Israel and Iran.[1] It also preserves material about the businesses and connections he maintained in Egypt under the identity Max Bineth.[1] Its listed languages are Hebrew, English, and German.[1] His correspondence with former youth-group members preserves their accounts of continuing Jewish youth activities in Iran and their requests for help immigrating to Israel.[2][3]

Bineth’s precise relationship to the sabotage network is described differently across accounts: some distinguish his intelligence-gathering mission from the local cell, while others record the accusation that he transferred funds to its members.[3][9] One account calls him the ring’s leader, in contrast to an account describing him as having been sent to Egypt without connection to the network.[9][10] His institutional affiliation is also variously identified as Mossad or Unit 131 of Military Intelligence.[3][9]

The wider dispute over authorization of Operation Susannah remained unresolved: Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon denied knowledge of the operation, while Intelligence Directorate head Benjamin Gibli maintained that Lavon had authorized it verbally.[7] A two-person inquiry did not establish which account was correct; Lavon resigned in February 1955, and the continuing political struggle later contributed to David Ben-Gurion’s resignation in 1963.[7]