his bones being repatriated. Born and educated in Egypt, Cohen became an agent for the military intelligence service after settling in Israel; he was sent to Damascus in the early 1960s with orders to discover the secrets of Syrian army dispositions.

Posing as a wealthy Arab man-about-town, he charmed his way into the highest official circles, sending a stream of high-grade material back to his handlers: on one occasion, by then close to the ruling Ba'ath party, he joined a VIP tour of Syrian fortifications in the Golan, subsequently smuggling out sketches of the area to his handlers.

After control of Cohen passed to the Mossad spy agency, he continued to provide invaluable information, but early in 1965 counter-intelligence experts from the USSR, then Syria's ally, caught him in the act of sending a radio message.

The grief of Cohen’s widow and mother (above) is now only remembered by a handful of relatives

Nadia, 71, maintains his downfall was due in part to Mossad "squeezing" her husband for extra material, which led him to ignore routine security precautions for concealing radio traffic.

Convicted by a military tribunal which had denied him a lawyer, Cohen was executed in Martyrs' Square, Damscus, in May 1965 before some 10,000 spectators. Two years later, Syria suffered a crushing military defeat in the Six-Day War, when intelligence that Cohen had supplied contributed significantly to Israel's daring conquest of the well-defended Golan Heights.

Last December, Eli's brother Maurice, also ex-Mossad, died, leaving just a handful of surviving relatives to recite the Kaddish (mourning prayer) were his remains to come home. "What is Olmert waiting for?" Nadia wonders aloud. "That I go to my own grave?"