TEVEL.See MOSSAD.THIRD MAN, THE. See BAD BUSINESS; ELAD, AVRAHAM
(AVRI).THOMAS, JACK LEON (?–1962). An Egyptian-born American,
Thomas grew up in Cairo and later moved to Beirut and then to West
Germany. In 1958 he met a wealthy businessman, who called himself
Emil and claimed to be working for the NATO countries. The two be-
came friends, and Emil suggested that Thomas return to Egypt and
work for NATO to promote the overthrow of what he termed the cor-
rupt Nasserist regime. Emil was actually a Mossadcase officer, who
was applying the so-called false-flag recruiting technique, never
mentioning the word “Israel” in his conversations with Thomas.
Thomas’s motivation was financial gain, perhaps mixed in with some
ideology. Thomas accepted the new job and underwent a short but ex-
tensive course in Cologne on the tradecraft of espionage, such as se-
cretly photocopying documents, using invisible ink, hiding and se-
cretly mailing documents, and so on.
In July 1958 Thomas returned to Egypt and began to recruit in-
formers there. He frequently traveled to Europe to meet his “NATO”
handlers and to be paid for information. On one trip to West Ger-
many, Thomas met a German woman named Kathy Bendhof. They
married and Kathy became his courier. After a while, trust developed
between Thomas and his Mossad case officers, and they revealed to
him that he was actually working for Israel. This came as no surprise
to Thomas, who had suspected for some time that he was working for
the Israelis. He enlarged the network, recruiting two Armenians and
a Jewish nightclub performer in Egypt. Kathy underwent training in
intelligence in the Netherlands, including the art of secret radio trans-
mitting. Every few days, she would transmit information to Tel Aviv
using the radio transmitter hidden in her kitchen; in the same way, she
received more instructions on information to be obtained.
By this time, Thomas and his wife had acquired a good measure of
self-confidence. In one bungled attempt, the Thomas network tried un-
successfully to persuade an Egyptian Air Force pilot to defect to Israel
with his MiG jet fighter in return for $1 million (see also STEALING
THE MIG-21). Then in May 1960, the couple chose Hanna Karolos, a290 • TEVEL06-102 (04) Q-Z.qxd 3/24/06 7:26 AM Page 290