Sacha Baron Cohen, Eli Cohen, Israel, Syria

 

Sacha Baron Cohen, Eli Cohen, Israel, Syria

 Sacha Baron Cohen is a British actor, who is famous (or infamous), as “Borat”, as the felonious innkeeper in “Les Miserables”, and as diverse other comedic and semi-pornographic roles.  He was never my favorite actor.

 SBC plays an excellent straight role as the real-life Israeli spy, Eli Cohen in The Netflix series “The Spy”. With a mustache, Sacha Baron Cohen looks just like the real Eli Cohen.

 Eli Cohen ingratiated himself into the Syrian military and government establishments in the early 1960’s, and provided the Israelis with major strategic knowledge about fortifications in the Golan Heights, and Syrian military capabilities prior to the Six Day War. 

 He was caught, tortured and hanged by Syrian counter intelligence in 1965 under the government of Amin-al-Hafiz.  Eli Cohen is a national hero in Israel, with streets and buildings named after him 

 Watching this Netflix series took me back to my trip into Damascus, Syria in about August of 1966.  The visa in my old passport is faded, and in Arabic, but I attached a copy of it.  My reason for motoring into Syria was a work-related requirement to get my passport stamped as incoming from an Arab country.

 At the time that we drove into Syria, the government was that of the very leftist, pro-Soviet, Ba’athist government of Salah Jadid.  This was before Hafez-al-Assad, and his son, the current president of Syria, Bashar-al-Assad.

 Damascus is just 115 km from Beirut, where we started, but we stopped and toured the massive temples of Jupiter and Bacchus at Baalbek (Heliopolis, in Greek), Lebanon, which is about half way to Damascus.  I still marvel at how the Romans carried those massive blocks of marble over the mountains from the Mediterranean coast.

 I had previously driven in East Germany and seen East Berlin.  Syria, under the left-wing Ba’ath Party had the same red signs and cult of personality that East Germany and East Berlin had a few years prior.

 We had the Muslim, Arabic speaking personnel director from Caltex Lebanon with us, so our trip into, and out of Damascus was uneventful.  We wanted to visit the main mosque in Damascus, but it was closed to us infidels.

Ray Gruszecki

November 10, 2020