In 1961, after more than 14 years of clandestine work, she was arrested by Lebanese authorities, tortured, and sentenced to death.
By Hezy Laing
Shulamit Cohen’s story is one of those rare pieces of Middle Eastern espionage history that feels almost impossible — a woman living an entirely ordinary life on the surface while running one of the most important Israeli intelligence networks in the Arab world for more than a decade.
Shulamit “Shula” Cohen was born in Buenos Aires in 1917 and raised in Jerusalem, where she married a wealthy Lebanese Jewish businessman, Joseph Cohen.
In 1946 she moved with him to Beirut, settling into what appeared to be the life of a respectable mother and housewife in the upscale Wadi Abu Jamil neighborhood.
In reality, she soon became one of the earliest and most effective agents of what would later become Mossad and Aman’s clandestine networks in Lebanon.
Her home became a discreet meeting point for couriers, informants, and operatives moving between Beirut, southern Lebanon, and Israel.
She built her network through social intelligence — cultivating relationships with Lebanese officials, businessmen, and military figures who had no idea she was passing information across the border.
She used her fluency in Arabic, French, and Hebrew to navigate Beirut’s layered society, and her status as a well‑connected woman allowed her to move in spaces where male operatives would have drawn suspicion.
Cohen’s intelligence was crucial during the late 1940s and 1950s, especially in tracking Palestinian fedayeen activity, Syrian and Lebanese troop movements, and the growing presence of Egyptian intelligence in Beirut.
She also played a key role in helping hundreds of Lebanese Jews escape to Israel through covert routes, earning her the nickname “The Pearl” within Israeli intelligence circles.
Her work was extraordinarily dangerous. Beirut in the 1950s and early 1960s was a battleground of competing Arab intelligence services, and Cohen operated under constant surveillance.
In 1961, after more than 14 years of clandestine work, she was arrested by Lebanese authorities, tortured, and sentenced to death — a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment.
She spent six years in prison before being released in a 1967 prisoner exchange following the Six‑Day War.
After returning to Israel, Cohen received the Medal of Valor, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. She lived quietly in Jerusalem until her death in 2017 at age 100.
Her story stands as a reminder that some of the most consequential intelligence work in the region was carried out not by soldiers or spies in trench coats, but by a woman who hid an entire clandestine network behind the façade of domestic life.
