Foreign News: Death of a Spy

In Beirut’s crowded International Airport one day last week, a ticket clerk idly noted that pallid, long-haired Mohammed Mahmoud Jamil’s frustration at missing his Middle East Airlines flight seemed unusually shrill. As Jamil moved away to consult another airline, the clerk suddenly became aware that the distraught traveler was being followed by two toughs in yellow sports shirts. Jamil’s bride of two months saw the toughs too. Plucking at his sleeve, she pointed at them. Hissed back Jamil: “Don’t look over there.”

At that, the two toughs began to move in. One touched Jamil’s elbow with his hand and asked him to come with them. Jamil refused, and for a moment the two men squared off against each other wordlessly. Then the thug seized Jamil by the hair, pulled his head down and, steadying it, sent home two jarring punches. As Jamil’s body sagged and the airport crowd surged in to break up what looked like a personal quarrel, the second tough fired four shots into Jamil’s body. Simultaneously, two other men loitering near the terminal exit opened fire at the ceiling. As the crowd scattered in panic, the assassins made their getaway.

While Jamil lay dying, his wife sobbed out his tale—the sordid, nightmare history of a professional spy. Ostensibly assisting the military attaché in the Egyptian embassy in Baghdad, Syrian-born Jamil had been a trusted U.A.R. intelligence agent, as such had been privy to the part the Egyptians had played in setting up the Mosul revolt against Iraqi Premier Abdul Karim Kassem last March. In fact, however, Jamil was a double agent introduced into the Egyptian embassy by the Iraqi espionage service—to which he had given invaluable warning of the Mosul coup.

When the Egyptians finally got wise to Jamil, his Iraqi bosses sent him off to Beirut to continue his spying there. Newly married and assigned to the Iraqi military attache’s office, Jamil began to lead what to an ex-double agent presumably seemed a delightfully regular life. Then came an order from Baghdad recalling him to Iraq to testify at the trial of an alleged Mosul revolt instigator, Brigadier Nadhem Ta-bakchali. Though none of the three suspects held by Beirut police at week’s end were likely to admit it, the presumption was that at this embarrassing news, one or another of the U.A.R.’s ubiquitous intelligence agencies had decided to close out its file on Mohammed Mahmoud Jamil.