A female Mossad agent’s treasure trove of photos

On Oct 8, 1965, the chief of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, presented the country's prime minister with a plan to assassinate several leading Palestinian militants based in Beirut with letter bombs.

"It will be a woman doing it," said the Mossad chief, Meir Amit, according to transcripts of the meeting with the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, seen by The New York Times. The agent would travel to Beirut and slip the bombs into a mailbox there, he said. At a later meeting, Amit told the prime minister that the woman was a Mossad agent using a Canadian passport who was working as a photographer for a French press agency.

The woman's identity, Sylvia Rafael, and her face, later became known across the world when she was arrested as a member of a Mossad team that had planned to kill another top Palestinian militant in Norway but shot the wrong man.