Heba Salim was an Egyptian woman who said she spied in service of peace. Her story is the basis a famous Egyptian movie, Al sood ila al haweyah. (Climbing to the Abyss) I never knew her story until I read it in Egyptian Streets.
At a time when Egyptian President Sadat was planning his next step for peace with Israel as part of the Camp David Accords, young Heba Selim was in the shadows working with the Mossad to seduce an Egyptian army officer and gather confidential information to help Israel defeat Egypt during the [1973] Yom Kippur War.
In her own words, she reckoned that she was also working for peace, telling General Rifaat Osman Gabriel in her last days, “I am not a spy, but I work in order to preserve the human race from destruction.”
Her Mossad handler used a variation of the “honey trap,” the exploitation of love, for the goals of espionage.
In a conversation with the Mossad officer, Selim informed him that she knew Lieutenant Colonel Farouk Al-Feki whom she had met at the Al-Jazira club and who was reportedly madly in love with her. Al-Feki, who later became Selim’s fiancé, was eventually recruited by the Mossad to become an agent and work alongside her to provide the Israelis with Egyptian military secrets in the post-1967 war era. Together, they rented an apartment in Maadi, where Selim taught him to write in invisible ink to send letters to Paris.
In these letters, Al-Feki leaked military documents and maps showing the missile platforms and the new missile sites that arrived from Russia, which he highlighted for their importance. During the Yom Kippur War, intelligence provided by Selim helped Israel destroy many Egyptian aircraft missile bases and cause huge losses for the Egyptian army.
Both were caught by Egyptian intelligence, brought to trial and convicted of treason. Selim was hanged. Al-Feki was executed by a firing squad.
Source: The Story of Heba Selim: The Egyptian Spy Who Worked for the Israeli Mossad | Egyptian Streets
