Raafat Al Haggan

According to Israeli intelligence records, "Jacques Bitton" was regarded as a highly skilled Egyptian agent. Egypt's official account states that Refaat al-Gammal (Raafat al-Haggan) was sent to Israel in a long operation that began in 1956 and continued into the early 1970s. During this period he ran a tourism business in Tel Aviv, gained social standing, and passed intelligence to Egypt. He was credited for reporting the start date of the 1967 Six-Day War and technical details regarding the Bar Lev Line used in planning for the October 1973 War. He is treated in Egypt as a national figure. Some details of his activities remain classified.

Celebrated in Egypt as a national hero, Raafat al-Haggan's story was contested in Israel. Some Israeli accounts described him as a double agent, a claim Egyptian officials rejected as disinformation. After his mission, he retired, lived in West Germany, and died in 1982. His identity became public when Egyptian state television aired Raafat al-Haggan in 1988, with Mahmoud Abdel Aziz in the lead role. Israeli officials initially dismissed the series as fiction, later acknowledging that Jacques Bitton had spied for Egypt while contending that Israeli security suffered limited damage. Early intelligence statements characterized Egypt's version as a fabricated tale, yet former Mossad chief Isser Harel later said authorities sensed a deep penetration at high levels without suspecting Bitton.

Since 1988, Israeli media have sought to identify Bitton/Al-Haggan. The Jerusalem Post reported that he was Refaat al-Gammal, an Egyptian Jew born in Mansoura in 1919 who arrived in Israel in 1955 and left in 1973. Reports state that he cultivated ties with senior officials, including David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and Ezer Weizman, and that he even considered running for the Knesset. In a later book, The Spies: Israel's Counterintelligence Wars, Eitan Haber and Yossi Melman are cited as confirming many elements of the Egyptian account while adding the claim that he also cooperated with Israeli intelligence and served both sides.