THE SOUL OF SYLVIA

Naming a lane after one of Israel’s finest field agents – Sylvia Raphael– brought back memories about a heroic South African woman that resonates to an Israel today at war

By David E. Kaplan

It was long overdue.

On the 22 January 2024, people from kibbutzim and towns and cities across Israel came together alongside a green picturesque riverbank park in Rosh Ha’Ayin in central Israel to attend a lane-naming ceremony. They did so bound by a past that was in some way connected to the extraordinary life of a South African woman born in Graaf-Reinet to an atheist Jewish father and an Afrikaner Calvinist mother and who for reasons deep within her as well as late awakenings about the horrors of the Holocaust, placed herself in the most life-threatening situations spying for Israel. The sixties and early seventies were a most dangerous period for Israel; it was to be a most dangerous period for Sylvia Raphael.

As a journalist in Israel who has spent nearly 20 years researching and writing about fellow South African Sylvia Raphael, thoughts percolated through my mind as I watched the mayor of Rosh Ha’Ayin pull the cord to reveal the sign that read in English and Hebrew Sylvia Raphael Lane 1935-2005. Only 20 minutes earlier, as I walked from my parked car, I was stopped by a curious local resident, a young father wheeling a baby in a pram, who asked who the lane, across from his home, was being named after. When I told him, he asked:

“מי היא הייתה?” (Who was she?)

This is why I began this article with “long overdue”, although, as I watched the cloth give way to the name Sylvia Raphael, I took comfort it was fulfilling the prophetic words of former defense correspondent, and close associate and advisor to Yitzhak Rabin, Eitan Haber. Back in 2005he wrote in Israel’s daily,Yediot Ahronot following Sylvia’s funeral at Kibbutz Ramat HaKovesh that:

 “One day when true peace comes, they will write books about her, name streets after her and make movies of her life.”  

Well, we are far from “true peace”, nevertheless there has since been a book, many articles, an internationally acclaimed documentary “Tracing Blood” directed by Saxon Logan in which I was interviewed, a square named after her at the Moshava (settelment) Migdal in the north of Israel, and on this 22 January 2024, a lane in Rosh Ha’Ayin in central Israel.  I looked around at her old friends, representatives from the South African community in Israel and colleagues from the shadowy world of espionage and I was sure that going through everyone’s minds was:

 “How we could have done with Sylvia today.”

On everyone mind in Israel is the October 7 massacre, our hostages in Gaza and the daily loss of our precious soldiers. It is like an inescapable daily horror show and we all know it occurred due to a gross failure on intelligence. In these tragic times, we reflected on not only on the fascinating life of Sylvia but her abilities of providing critical intel, a professional attribute that Sylvia was in a class of her own.  As Haber so poignantly and poetically put it:

“If Israelis knew what Sylvia actually did for future generations, they would go twice a week to her grave to lay flowers that it would one day reach the heavens.”

Well, the local resident who stopped to question me, need not go to her graveside to lay flowers but could step onto the lane each day, walk along the bank under the shade of trees with his children and appreciate he is doing so in safety because of the service Sylvia once performed. 

So, who was Silvia?

In a 2005 interview for The Jerusalem Post following Sylvia’s funeral, her Norwegian husband, Annaeus Scholdt, revealed to me:

 “She was a gifted woman; quick witted; and well qualified to do what was required of her. I still do not know – even as her husband and her lawyer – what she had done prior to her business in Norway. She was the consummate professional; she would never speak to me about her Mossad past. All I know it was extremely dangerous.”

It must have been!

Sylvia took over from Israeli spy Eli Cohen following his public hanging in Damascus in May 1965 defying the Syrian assumption that Israel would never replace him with a woman; in 1967 she watched from a hotel balcony in Egypt as Israeli mirages flew over on a bombing mission; and as an intimate friend of the Jordanian Royal family, Sylvia used to babysit the current king of Jordan, King Abdullah!

Only a few years earlier, Sylvia had joined the stream of young ‘sixties’ adventurers volunteering on kibbutzim, attracted by the alluring amalgam of ideology and fun on Israel’s agricultural cooperatives. She found herself on Kibbutz Gan Shmuel near Hadera. If her good looks were attracting attention, there were others too interested. The Mossad spotted and recruited her.

The late sixties and early seventies were turbulent times. Palestinian terrorism was constantly front-page news, replete with aircraft hijackings, assassinations and attacks on airports and embassies. Rising rapidly to become one of Israel’s top field agents, Raphael posed as a Canadian freelance photojournalist, Patricia Roxburgh joining an agency in Paris, known for its sympathies for the Palestinians. Dropping subtle antisemitic barbs on the European cocktail circuit, she ingratiated herself into anti-Israel circles easing her penetration into the inner sanctums of the Arab world. Her brother David ‘Bunty’ Raphael says in the documentary:

 “One day she was in Cairo, the next in Damascus and a week later in Mogadishu. Who had even heard of Mogadishu in those days? We all thought she was covering stories for her publisher; now we know she was leading a complete double life.”

She had been one of the very few agents who penetrated the PLO bases in Jordan and Lebanon when an unattractive little-known terrorist dressed in khaki, a red and white headscarf and a holstered gun on his belt, had set his sights on causing as much mayhem and destruction in pursuit of high-profiling the Palestinian cause. Did the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ ever meet? With both Yasser Arafat and Raphael now gone – Who knows?  

Rising in the ranks to become one of the spy agency’s star operatives, most of Raphael’s exploits are still shrouded in mystery, apart from the one assignment that went horribly wrong. In July 1973, Raphael joined a hastily assembled team of Mossad agents to track down Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September’s operation chief in Europe and thought to be the mastermind of the Munich massacre. In the sedate Norwegian village of Lillehammer, the team gunned down a Moroccan waiter called Ahmed Bouchiki instead of Salameh. The documentary shows how Salameh deviously masterminded the Mossad to kill the expendable waiter. Sylvia had expressed constant doubts about the mission but her bosses authorized the mission to proceed.

No matter how professional, in the furtive world that Sylvia had lived, mistakes with lethal consequences were always a possibility. Hazards of the ‘trade’! The Mossad’s botched assassination would prove a prelude to another mistake, this time from the other side. In September 1985, Force 17, a splinter group of the PLO, murdered three Israelis on a yacht off the coastal resort of Larnaca in Cyprus. They claimed publicly that the victims were Mossad agents, one of whom was the prized Sylvia Raphael. They believed they had their revenge.

Not so! Raphael would live for another twenty years before succumbing to leukemia at the age of 67.

In 2015, I had occasion to interview Eitan Haber on the 20^th anniversary of the assassination of his close friend – Yitzchak Rabin. We sat in the Executive lunge of the Hilton Tel Aviv. At the end of the interview, I asked him:

“You said in 2005 that Sylvia was one of Israel’s best agents; can you tell me why?”

He replied, “She was not one of the best; she was THE best.”

Intrigued, I asked him to elaborate. He simply smiled and said:

 “I will say no more.”

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Although not strictly born Jewish, Sylvia felt Jewish. This was evident not only for the risks she took for the Jewish people but before she passed away in 2005 in Pretoria, South Africa, she had arranged to be buried in Israel, on the kibbutz that she was a member, Ramat Ha’Kovesh and for the following words to be inscribed on her stone:

“I am buried in the soil of my soul”

She most certainly is, and as of January 22, 2024, the lush soil along a lane in Rosh Ha’Ayin now too exudes the soul of Sylvia.

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