For the Alexandria cell, he recruited Shmuel Becor Azzar, Robert Nis-
sim Dassa, Victor Moise Levy, Meir Shmuel Meyuhas, Philip Her-
mann Nathanson, and Meir Yosef Za’afran.
Several of them were brought, secretly through Europe, to Israel
for military training—despite which they remained amateurs. The in-
structors of Unit 131 encountered many difficulties training them in
such tradecraft as invisible ink, coded radio broadcasts, and surveil-
lance techniques. All of these topics were entirely foreign to them.
Nevertheless, the members of the espionage network were sent back
to Egypt through Europe. They remained “sleepers” for three years
until the agreed codeword was broadcast over the Israeli army radio
channel Galei Zahal during the program “For the Housewife.”
At the end of 1951, Avraham (Avri) Elad, a former major in the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who had been reduced to the rank of pri-
vate for stealing a refrigerator from his unit, contacted Dar and the
commander of Unit 131, Lieutenant Colonel Mordechai (Motke)
Ben-Tsur. Elad was unemployed and divorced, and Ben-Tsur and
Dar deemed him the right man for the risky mission of working in en-
emy territory; he had nothing to lose, they believed, and he would be
grateful for the opportunity of rehabilitation.
The heads of Unit 131 decided to disguise Elad as a German
named Paul Frank. For a while Elad resided in West Germany to con-
struct his cover story. There he endured a very painful operation to re-
verse his circumcision so that if he happened to be seen naked in
Egypt he could not be identified as a Jew. In December 1953 Elad ar-
rived in Egypt as Paul Frank, a wealthy businessman, and he soon
blended into the expanding colony of expatriate Germans in Egypt.
Some of them had fled Germany because of their Nazi past. Elad’s
task was to take over as Israeli commander of the “sleeping” Jewish
espionage network. He contacted all its members, each of whom he
got to know personally and remembered by name.
After the revolution in Egypt in 1952, the United States exerted
pressure on Britain to withdraw from the Suez Canal zone in order to
keep Egypt in the pro-Western camp. There was great concern in Is-
rael about the forthcoming British evacuation of the canal zone. The
Israeli government regarded the presence of British forces in the
canal zone as a check against possible adventurous Egyptian tenden-
cies under Gamal Abdel Nasser.26 • BAD BUSINESS06-102 (02) A-G.qxd 3/24/06 7:23 AM Page 26