During the autumn of 1962, a young South African schoolteacher called Sylvia Rafael was sitting in her apartment in Tel Aviv, relaxing after a hard day’s work. She happened to be reading The Jewish War by Josephus Flavius, when the phone rang unexpectedly.

The man on the other end of the line introduced himself as Gadi. He informed Sylvia that he was a representative of an Israeli government agency looking for new female recruits. When Sylvia asked what kind of work this would entail, he explained that if she agreed to meet him at the Café Hadley, on Judah Halevi Street, in Tel Aviv, the next afternoon, all would be revealed.

Sylvia had travelled to Israel just three years previously. She had grown up in Pretoria, South Africa, in a family with a Jewish father and a gentile mother. But after a relative visited the Rafael home when Sylvia was very young— explaining how several family members had been massacred by the SS in the Ukraine during the Second World War— her appetite to learn about her Jewish ancestry grew voraciously. By the time she was in her teens, Sylvia had decided she was going to move to Israel: hoping to reconnect and interact with the Jewish culture from which she felt estranged.

The first day Sylvia met Gadi an opportunity to do that suddenly presented itself. Gadi was a code name for Moti Kfir— commander of Unit 188’s School for Special Operations in Mossad: the Intelligence Corps that was responsible for missions outside of Israel.

Kfir is now 77- years old, and a retired Mossad employee. Today, he recalls from his home in Tel Aviv, his first impressions of meeting Sylvia. “I knew I had seen a very intelligent person in front of me,” he says. “She seemed to understand quickly the things that were not said in the conversation. She also had a great sense of humour, which is a very efficient tool in clandestine activity.”

Kfir, along with Ram Oren — a popular Israeli author who has sold over a million books — has recently published in English, Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy (University of Kentucky Press).
The narrative documents Sylvia’s journey into the Israeli intelligence services, where began acclimatising in the early 1960s, acting as a photojournalist in Vancouver. After a six-month stint in Canada, where she mastered the art of living a double life — which involved learning how to interact with her surroundings, without ever compromising her true identity — Sylvia was then brought to Paris.

Central and Western Europe during this time was becoming a hotbed of activity for Arab terrorist organisations. Later on, in the summer of 1972, the PLO’s Black September division would carry out the Munich massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes competing in the Olympic games were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

Over time, Sylvia would become a seasoned Mossad operative. But her initial role began as a photographer. Her first job would be in an international photographic agency in Paris: under the fake name of Patricia Roxenburg. Sylvia became so successful at her job that pretty quickly she had a photography exhibition in the French capital.

Kfir explains why Mossad chose photography as Sylvia’s secret profession. “She was a very gifted artist,” he explains. “She drew, painted, and made films very successfully. And so this is a very easy cover to adopt. She wouldn’t need any background story, like where she went to university. She could just say to people that she learned everything herself. This kind of job fitted into her personality perfectly.”
Ironically, though, the more successful Sylvia became at her work, the more isolated she seemed to become in Parisian society.

When Sylvia turned 30, she was feeling disillusioned and even more lonely than usual. Nevertheless, her work kept her distracted. She landed another job with the Parisian photo agency she was working for. This involved taking photographs to launch a new tourist boat on the Seine. On board, on her very first day, she met a friendly German called Hans Rauch, who was also a professional photographer.

As the relationship developed into an intense romance, Sylvia fretted that she could not be honest with her lover. Fearing she may have had to end the relationship, or leave Mossad, she confided in her superiors. It was decided that Sylvia’s partner would be recruited to the Special Operations Unit, so as not to jeopardise Mossad’s security position. Kfir describes why this decision was taken. “At that time, we usually adopted the system of a one-person model. But Sylvia came and said: ‘I don’t want to lose my life as a woman, and I don’t want to stay without a family’. So put yourself in Mossad’s position. Here we had a gifted woman and combatant.

But there was the real possibility that if we refused or denied her request, she might decide that she would leave. So this was the compromise we took out of necessity. And it was carried out to minimise danger.”
Kfir speaks in the cryptic language you would expect of a typical intelligence worker. He refuses to be coaxed into any conversations that give too many details away. And when I ask him about specific operations — for example, a time when Sylvia was recruited to travel to Beirut to spy on Yasser Arafat— he simply says he will “not discuss such details.”

I have to eventually tease it out of him that Mossad lied to Sylvia about the fact that she would never see her lover again once they recruited him: this was to ensure that their operations in Europe were not disturbed or sacrificed in any way. “She was certainly disappointed the way this was conducted. But that is it,” says Kfir, sharply.

By July of 1973, Sylvia had become one of the top clandestine combatants in Unit 188. And she found herself on a mission in Lillehammer: a small town with a population of 20,000 in Norway.

She was there along with other combatants to assassinate Ali Salameh: the chief of operations for Black September, and Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man.

But what began as a top-secret mission, ended up as a public relations and international diplomatic-nightmare.
Despite calls from Sylvia to the rest of the team to hold off on the operation until they were 100 percent sure they had their man, two hit men from the Special Operations Unit shot an innocent Norwegian waiter 14 times.

Not only did they mistakenly presume it was Ali Salameh. He wasn’t even in Norway at the time.
In the end, Sylvia, was sentenced to five years in prison for the catastrophic mistake from Mossad.
So, when she finally came out of prison, how did she view the organisation to which she dedicated her entire life?

“On the one hand, even till the end of her life she never lost her loyalty to Mossad,” says Kfir. “But it is true that after the Lillehammer affair she was more selective in judging her superiors.
“And this operation also affected morale in Mossad itself. Then it affected morale in Israel. But Mossad carried on, corrected their mistakes, improved what was wrong, and then went on. Time is often the best remedy for correcting these errors.”

During her trial in Norway, Sylvia fell in love again: this time with her Norwegian lawyer, Annæus Schjødt whom she eventually married when she was released from prison. She never returned to work for Mossad after the Lillehammer affair, but instead retired into a quiet life with her husband: first living in Norway, and eventually settling back in South Africa for the last years of her life.

In February 2005, at the age of 68, Sylvia died from cancer. She was buried in the military section of the cemetery at Ramat Hakovesh, a kibbutz in central Israel.

“I always remember her husband at the end of her funeral in Israel saying to me: I hope one day someone will write about her, so I did,” says Kfir.

“She really was a unique character. And perhaps this had something to do with her seemingly conflicting identities, which were part of her till the last day: Christian and Jewish, Israeli and South African.”
“Very few people are buried twice, but Sylvia was,” explains Kfir. “She was cremated in South Africa and her ashes were then laid to rest in Israel. It is symbolic that the way she lived was the way she was buried: in two different countries, in two different homelands.”