This week, in a special commemoration ceremony, the Mossad will mark the 40th anniversary of the hanging of secret agent Eli Cohen in Damascus. The Syrian authorities still refuse to return his body for burial in Israel.

Cohen's capture and execution justly turned him into a symbol of the self-sacrifice of Israeli foreign agents. For years Cohen's life was endangered on a daily basis as he worked his way up the Syrian hierarchy and became a trusted presence in the halls of power.

I remember, as if it were only yesterday, how on the early morning of May 18, 1965, two friends of mine from the Mossad appeared in my Paris apartment. My unexpected guests asked me, as Maariv's correspondent in France, to check through the news agencies and see whether it was true that Cohen had in fact been hanged that night in Damascus.

Until that tragic moment the Israeli media had, at the request of Mossad director Maj.-gen. (res.) Meir Amit, maintained silence for several months about the Israeli agent's arrest and trial. This was to permit tremendous, discreet Israeli efforts to save Cohen from hanging.

Col. Yosef Yariv, Cohen's immediate superior, tried by every means possible to persuade the Syrian leadership to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. He offered to pay money or send shipments of agricultural equipment and medicines; to no avail.

Cohen's trial and execution permitted a unique peek into the world of the secret Israeli war. Most of the intelligence agents of the Jewish state who had penetrated Arab countries returned home safely, and therefore no one had known of their successes until then.

Together with my journalist friend Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, who worked in Paris for Yediot Aharonot, we published in France in 1967 the first complete book about Cohen's operations in Damascus. The book also appeared in English under the title The Spy from Israel.

The Mossad heads were not thrilled that we had published the book, since it exposed for the first time the depth of the Mossad's penetration into Arab countries in the years before the 1967 Six Day War.

NOW, 40 years later, it can be stated with certainty that listening equipment made in the USSR permitted the Syrians to locate the source of Cohen's broadcasts to Israel and catch him in the act. The information that he regularly supplied from Damascus was of tremendous value to the small State of Israel.

Col. Yariv, aware that Cohen's widow, Nadia, and their children had lost the person dearest to them, made sure they received generous compensation. Although Amit also handled the affair very conscientiously, some people accused him of responsibility for the failure in Damascus.

Yariv, who died some years ago, found it painful that some people claimed he was responsible for Cohen's capture. They maintained that while Cohen felt it would be too dangerous for him to continue working in Damascus, Yariv pressured him into staying on.

"This is a slander," Yariv told me angrily. "They are doing me an injustice!"

Those familiar with Cohen's personal file in the Mossad know that, in fact, Cohen himself insisted he continue his mission.

Furthermore, Yariv was not the kind of man who sent his agents to participate in the secret war while he remained safe in his office. Throughout his life Yariv did not hesitate to endanger himself, whether as a senior officer in army Intelligence, or later in the Mossad.

He described to me how he himself had transported, over icy roads in Europe, a bomb intended to intimidate Nazi scientists who wanted to produce missiles in Egypt to be used against Israel. On another occasion he told me how, as head of a Mossad team, he had executed a Latvian war criminal in Uruguay. (This was Herberts Cukurs, who found secret refuge in South America after slaughtering the Jews of Riga.)

Instead of slinging mud at Mossad commanders Yosef Yariv and Meir Amit, the time has come, after four decades, to restore their honor in the Eli Cohen affair.