An excellent espionage series about an Israeli spy undercover in Syria

The Gideon Raff-created British series The Spy (2019), starring Sascha Baron Cohen as the Israeli spy Eli Cohen (no relation, apparently), is another in the long run of high-quality suspenseful espionage miniseries, though this one with a particular plaudit: The often hard-to-believe story is in fact based, somewhat closely I think, on true events (we see actual footage of Eli Cohen in the final episode). The essence of the story is that Eli, an Egyptian-born Muslim now married to an Israeli jew (ca 1962) is recruited by Mossad to leave his wife and daughter and go undercover as a spy in Syria, an assignment that he, a true Israeli patriot and an extremely brave and wily man, takes on willingly – even though he can tell noone, not even his wife, what he’s up to; he tells her and others that he has a new job in procurement that requires extensive travel (hard to believe that his wife can’t see through this, but even so he did have to live apart from her for months at a time). He goes first to Argentina, then on to Damascus, where he becomes something like a Jeffrey Epstein figure, insinuating his way into top ranks of government/military and winning favor through lavish entertainments and sex orgies (in which he pointedly does not participate). There are many close calls and escapes – no way to tell how many of these are based on fact; most I think are invented or posited for the series, as EC never wrote a memoir – but we see up close the tension and the challenges of this kind of undercover work, far from the glamour of a James Bond or the quite competence of a Smiley. At times the series is a little heavy-handed, in particular that we never understand how much his wife knows or doesn’t know, but overall it’s a fine and exceedingly tense spy drama and a look at the heart of Israeli espionage in the 1960s (though note that, unlike the Israeli series Fauda, The Spy makes no attempt at a positive or sympathetic portrayal of life in the Muslim families in the Arab world).