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When Mossad officer Zvi Aharoni landed in Argentina to kidnap war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Zvi needed help from the Sayanim - the shadowy global network of Jews willing to help Mossad in any way possible. No questions asked.

Zvi’s job was to locate Eichmann in Buenos Aires, but it was 1960. There was no Internet and Zvi didn’t speak Spanish. Instead, he called in the Sayanim volunteers who could arrange a safe house, cash, license plates, and any other support he’d need. More than 60 years later, the Sayanim are believed to still work in the shadows.

"Without its Sayanim, Mossad could not operate," British investigative journalist and author Gordon Thomas writes in Gideon's Spies. “They collect technical data and all kinds of 'overt' intelligence: a rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a half-finished story at a dinner party."

In Zvi’s case, he wanted one of the Sayan - the singular of Sayanim - to deliver a ‘present’ to an address linked to Eichmann. Discovering the family had moved, the Sayan coaxed a carpenter working on the home to reveal the new address and reported back to Zvi. Job done, the Sayan departed under strict orders not to mention the episode to anyone. Mossad soon mobilized, abducting Eichmann on the street near his new home and bringing him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes.
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Mossad’s underground helpers

A Sayan must be 100 percent Jewish and in many cases a dual national. Because of that, the Huffington Post questioned whether Mossad used Sayanim passports as cover for the Mossad agents who entered Dubai in 2010 to assassinate Hamas arms dealer Mahmoud Abdel Rauf al-Mabhouh.

Former Mossad director Meir Amit created the Sayanim (the Hebrew word for helpers or assistants) in the 1960s to support the Katsas, Mossad’s field intelligence officers. “By 1998, there were more than 4,000 Sayanim in Britain, almost four times as many as in the US,” Thomas writes, with Mossad spending several hundred million dollars a month maintaining its assets, paying the expenses of the Sayanim, running safe houses, and covering operational costs.

Every country is believed to have a Sayanim network built from the Jewish community. The UK’s most famous Sayan was Robert Maxwell, the British media barron, according to Thomas. The Sayan are not formal agents but lend support on request and assist with activities including gathering intelligence or planting a news story. The network is based on personal relationships, shared cultural and religious ties, and a sense of solidarity with Israel.

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Operation Wrath of God

In Operation Wrath of God, Mossad aimed to assassinate all of those involved in the Munich massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in West Germany. Mossad, authorized by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, identified a Palestinian group known as Black September as the culprits and reportedly spent more than 20 years tracking down those involved.

Israel wanted to instil fear in Black September members as well as exact revenge.

"The assassinations were coupled by obituaries in the local paper arranged by local Arab Sayanim and the targets’ families received condolence cards and flowers before each assassination was carried out," according to researcher Amy Catherine Kirchheimer.

Spies like us‍

​​Was Bond actor Chaim Topal a Sayan or a Mossad officer?

After his death in March 2023, Topol’s family revealed that he was a close friend of Mossad officer Zvika Malkin, who helped kidnap Eichmann. Topal assisted Zvika with security arrangements at various times, offering him a safe house in London, and helping Mossad transfer documents and install surveillance equipment during the ‘70s and ‘80s during a period when he would have also been starring alongside Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only (1981).

Topol’s daughter, Adi, told Haaretz newspaper that Zvika always showed up at their London home wearing a disguise, coming through the backyard so he wouldn’t be seen, and then entering the family’s apartment: “You don’t have a key, so how did you get in?’ I asked him once, and he replied in his nasal tone: ‘You call that a lock?’”

Mordechai Vanunu and the Sayanim

After nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu leaked Israel's nuclear arms secrets to the London media in 1986, Israel wanted to know where Vanunu was staying. The Sayanim were mobilized. "Scores of trusted Jewish volunteers had each been given lists of hotels and boarding houses to check,” Thomas said.

Once located, Mossad operative Cheryl Bentov famously posed as ‘Cindy’, an American tourist from Florida. She approached Vanunu and later persuaded him to join her on a trip to Rome. Vanunu’s ‘romantic’ weekend in Italy involved being drugged, kidnapped, smuggled onto a commando boat, and transferred to a yacht that brought him to Israel where he was imprisoned.