Refaat Al-Gammal

Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID), claims that he moved to Israel as an Egyptian Intelligence asset in 1956. He was well known in the Israeli society and was involved in commercial projects. According to the Egyptians, he provided the Egyptian intelligence service with important information while operating a tourism company as a front. Al-Gammal's intelligence concerned, among other things, the Six-Day War, and he had an important role in the Yom Kippur War by providing Egypt with detailed engineering data about the Bar Lev Line. Al-Gammal is considered a national hero in Egypt. Most information about him is still confidential.

The Lavon Affair refers to the scandal over a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as Operation Susannah, in which Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt were bombed in the summer of 1954. It became known as the Lavon Affair after the Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon, who was forced to resign because of the incident, or euphemistically as the Unfortunate Affair (Hebrew: עסק הביש Esek HaBish). Israel admitted responsibility in 2005.

The revolution of 1952 broke out, and the British realized that the Egyptians sympathized with the new government, and they grew more stringent in fighting counterfeiting. Refaat, worried that he would be discovered, left his job and got a new fake passport from a Swiss journalist, moving from one name to another until he was arrested by a British officer while traveling to Libya in 1953. He was arrested carrying a British passport but the British officer thought he was Israeli, so he was handed over to the Egyptian Intelligence service which started investigating him as a probable Israeli spy.

He graduated in 1946 and took a job as an accountant for an oil company working in the Red Sea. He was later accused of stealing money from the company and fired. He then moved from one job to another and eventually worked as an assistant to an accounting officer on the ship Horus. He left Egypt for the first time of his life on Horus, traveling to Naples, Genoa, Marseille, Barcelona, Tangier and eventually Liverpool.

AlGammal learned English and French in a private school. In 1936, his father died leaving Al-Gammal's older brother Samy responsible for the family. Samy moved the family to Cairo. There, after his father's death Al-Gammal's half brother Samy decided to not pay for the high cost of private school, so he enrolled him in the intermediate school of commerce where Al-Gammal was astonished by the British and impressed by their struggle against the onslaught of the Nazis. Al-Gammal became an Anglophile, learning English so fluently as to effect a British accent.

Refaat Ali Suleiman Al-Gammal (Arabic: رفعت علي سليمان الجمال) (July 1, 1927 – January 30, 1982), better known as Raafat Al-Haggan (Arabic: رأفت الهجّان) in Egypt and as Jack Bitton in Israel, was an Egyptian spy who spent 17 years performing clandestine operations in Israel.

Al-Gammal was born in Damietta in what was then the Kingdom of Egypt (nowadays the Arab Republic of Egypt) on July 1, 1927. His father was a coal trader and his mother a housewife who spoke English, French and Arabic.

Hosny attempted several times to recruit Al-Gammal, who eventually had to choose between jail or working for the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID) under a new identity. Al-Gammal chose EGID, and underwent extensive training where he learned the goals of the revolution, economics and the success secrets of multi-national firms in addition to the habits, behavior, history and religion of Jews. He also learned how to tell the Ashkenazi Jews from the Sephardi Jews, how to fight, and to take photos covertly and with miniaturised cameras. He also learned radio communications, intelligence collection and how to make bombs. He assumed the identity of Jacques Beton, an Ashkenazi Jew born 1919 to a French father and an Italian mother. He then moved to live in Alexandria in a neighbourhood mainly inhabited by the Jews and took a decent job in an insurance company. He approached the Jews until he became an important figure among the secret Jewish movements in Egypt.