“Our spies get thrown out of English balconies."
This is a line of dark humour from the Arab world, inspired by the deaths of several Arabs who were rumoured to have been secret agents.
On June 21, 2001, the Egyptian actress Souad Hosny, known as the "Cinderella of Egyptian cinema" and one of the most influential actresses from the 1950s to 1970s, died after falling from a balcony of a building in London.
On June 27, 2007, Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian businessman who was the son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, also plunged to his death from the balcony of a London building.
The plot thickens: each was writing memoirs at the time of their deaths. And despite investigation by the authorities and their families, the drafts of the memoirs have disappeared.
Marwan has been dubbed the 20th century’s greatest spy. It was revealed in 2002 that he had spied for Israel under the Mossad code name "The Angel". Then there were rumours that he was a double agent who also worked for Egypt, and it was rumoured he also worked with the American, British and Italian intelligence agencies. There are still regular newspaper articles and books about Marwan – the latest being The Spy Who Fell to Earth, written by Ahron Bregman, who first exposed Marwan’s Mossad connection.
Hosny was said to have been writing about how film stars such as herself were recruited to work for Egypt’s national security apparatus, and that her job included performing sexual acts. This pressure on celebrities to become spies has been highlighted in several television drama series, including El Shahroura (2011), about the life of the late Lebanese singer Sabah.
So the Arab world not only has its own James Bond, but it also has several. Some have even better stories of intrigue and danger than the fictional British secret agent, who is being celebrated at the Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style exhibition that opened at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai on November 14.
There were also some exotic seductresses in the mould of Mata Hari, the Dutch femme fatale who was convicted of spying for Germany in the First World War and executed by a French firing squad in 1917.
Another example is the beautiful and mysterious Syrian Druze princess Asmahan, who died when the car she was travelling in plunged into a canal in Egypt in 1944. She and a female friend, who were sitting in the back seat of the two-door car, drowned, but the vehicle’s driver escaped.
Her links with British intelligence and the Free French Forces during the Second World War, when she spied on Nazi Germany, led to a series of rumours over her mysterious death at the age of 26.
Some said that the British killed her after taking what they needed. Others said the German Gestapo killed her for giving information to the British. Yet others said her Egyptian rival, the legendary singer Umm Kulthum, was somehow involved. For some reason, all these spy deaths seem to have happened in the summer months of June or July.
For the sake of keeping a country safe, there will always be secret agents and spies. Their presence is obvious in war zones, where they sometimes all hang out in the same place – as they did at Lebanon’s iconic St Georges Hotel, which hosted the likes of the notorious double agent Kim Philby, a British intelligence agent who defected to the Soviet Union. During the 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War, the word about town was that if a journalist wanted a scoop, they could drop by the St Georges and speak to their choice of spy from around the world.
Despite the many clichés about spies, the stories of their lives and escapades continue to intrigue us, long after they have left this Earth – be it by falling from a London balcony or other means.
Asmahan, a princess, a star and a spy.