The Mossad spy from Graaff-Reinet

Sylvia Raphael’s story isn’t well known in South Africa. This remarkable, vivacious woman, born in Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo in 1937, became a Mossad superspy. Raphael’s efforts to assassinate the perpetrators of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics landed her in a Norwegian prison cell.

Her life in the shadows was unpacked in a Zoom discussion on Saturday night hosted by the SA Jewish Report.

While Raphael’s father was Jewish, she was baptised Dutch Reformed, her mother’s church. Lynette de Villiers was her friend since kindergarten. “She was always different. She was tall, striking, with long black hair. She had an answer for everything, and was extremely funny. She made up the most amusing stories about why she was late for school. She loved acting. Her father, Ferdinand, owned the bioscope [cinema] and we sold tickets there to get a look at the boys!”

After studying at Rhodes University, “Sylvia went to Israel to look for her roots,” De Villiers said. “She was the most adventurous person I ever knew. She was up for anything. She spoke many languages – English, Afrikaans, French, German, Hebrew, Arabic – and fluent Norwegian, which she later learnt in jail.”

Working on a kibbutz, she was just what the Mossad was looking for – an attractive gentile who could speak Hebrew and Arabic, and who loved Israel. The Mossad sent her to Canada, where she assumed the identity of photographer Patricia Roxborough, and then onto Paris.

Journalist John Swain was a young reporter for Agence France-Presse in Paris in the 1960s. “I unwittingly fell for her, in a Mossad honeytrap,” he said. “We became lovers. I suppose she saw me as an entrée to the Anglo-Saxon press corps in Paris. She was often away for many days and not entirely reliable in that sense. No one had any idea of her real identity.”

Both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Mossad were active in Paris. “She gave me no hint that she was firmly on one side of the Arab-Israel conflict,” Swain said. They had planned to go to Libya to interview the charismatic Muammar Gaddafi who had just seized power, but this did not materialise.

The operational details of what Raphael actually did are shrouded in mystery and secrecy, as is much in the world of espionage, said David Kaplan. He is an ex-South African journalist now living in Kfar Saba in Israel, who has unearthed much of Raphael’s story.

Filmmaker Saxon Logan, who made a documentary about her life, Sylvia – Tracing Blood, said she was known to have operated in Cairo, Mogadishu (in Somalia), Asmara (in Eritrea), Djibouti, Beirut, Amman, and Damascus. She is said to have replaced Eli Cohen in Damascus, who pierced the top echelons of the Syrian establishment and was publicly hanged for it in 1965. “Sylvia had to fool the best, and she did. She managed to get into the inner sanctums of the Arab world. She was chameleon-like; she could blend in anywhere,” said Logan.

She was the nanny to the children of King Hussein of Jordan at the time the PLO was trying to take over the country. Fifty thousand Palestinians were killed by Jordanian forces in September 1970, and the PLO was forced to flee to Lebanon. Raphael met Arafat, and infiltrated the PLO.

After the 1972 Munich Massacre, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorised Operation Wrath of G-d to assassinate the perpetrators. Rafael is considered responsible for the bomb that killed the head of the PLO in France, Mahmoud Hamshari. She is also wanted for killings in Rome. In the Steven Spielberg film Munich, Rafael’s character is played by Daniel Craig. Apparently, Spielberg didn’t realise the South African on the team was a woman.

In 1973, she was involved in a plot to assassinate “The Red Prince”, Ali Hassan Salameh, from the Black September terrorist group, and Arafat’s heir apparent. Mossad intelligence placed Salameh in Lillehammer, Norway. He was killed by 14 shots in front of his pregnant wife. But the victim turned out to be Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter. Kaplan believes it was a trap to expose the Mossad. Salameh mocked Mossad for killing a pool attendant (one of Bouchikhi’s other jobs). Two greenhorn Mossad operatives soon cracked under interrogation, and Raphael was captured.

Swain was in Saigon, Vietnam, and saw the story on the Reuters wire. “I was flabbergasted,” he said. He had no idea his former girlfriend, Roxborough, was an Israeli spy.

On appeal, Raphael got a light sentence of 5½ years, and only served 18 months. She quipped, “I went from 007 to 005½.” She was allowed to go shopping, and spent much time with the female warder in her office. Raphael later survived at least three assassination attempts by the PLO.

After her release in 1976, she married her appellant advocate Annæus Schjødt, and they lived in Pretoria for a long time. It was there that she reached out to her nephew, Derek Watts, the veteran Carte Blanche journalist. “She was warm and companionable, and had so many stories to tell,” he said. “We bonded as fellow ‘journalists’.”

Raphael died of leukaemia in 2005, and was cremated in South Africa. Her ashes were taken to Kibbutz Ramat Hachofetz. The who’s who of the Israeli intelligence community was at her top-secret memorial service. One writer said, “When true peace eventually comes, they will write books, make movies, and name streets after her.”

Logan said, “She did what she did in reaction to how Jews were treated in the 1930s and 1940s. She was horrified, and made her own private pact to protect the Jewish people and their homeland.”

In Logan’s film, Israelis are urged to lay wreaths on her grave due to the debt Israel owes to her. They do that to this day. The film has been shown worldwide, except in South Africa. He surmises that celebrating an Israeli superheroine is, unfortunately, politically unpalatable.