The Capucci File
by Gidon Maron
13 X one hour
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Producers Michael Sharfshtein Moshe Edery Leon Edery Eran Riklis
Charming, charismatic Hilarion Capucci was the Catholic world’s most senior religious figure in the Middle East. He was also a mega-terrorist who became the nemesis of Israel’s Security Agency, the Shin Bet, and its top agent, Judah Arbel.
Hilarion Capucci was the Catholic world’s most senior religious figure in Israel and throughout the Middle East. Yet in the 1970s he became a mega-terrorist, working directly for Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO. As archbishop, his diocese included Jerusalem, the West Bank, and parts of Israel. It was in this capacity that he was responsible for a number of resounding terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. He was finally caught by Israel’s Security Agency (the Shabak AKA the Shin Bet), while trying to assassinate U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was in Jerusalem to mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Syria.
Capucci was known as Jerusalem’s “Don Juan” because of his many lovers. He was a charming, charismatic man, who spent years taunting the Shin Bet’s Arab Department, headed by Judah Arbel, an observing Jew and a former Mossad field agent.
The two men were both enemies and friends, who admired each other, despite the war raged between them. Just before Arbel revealed that the archbishop was behind one of the biggest terrorist attacks at the time, the archbishop saved the life of Arbel’s nephew, who went missing in the 1973 War.
In the 1970s, a secret war was being waged in the narrow, sprawling alleys of Jerusalem’s Old City. It took place in the confession booths of Jerusalem’s churches and in tiny, dark apartments and extended all the way to Amman, Beirut and Damascus. It was a war of unexpected twists and turns, of traitors and double agents, a war fueled by passions and infatuations, by great loves and manipulations; it was a war of extortion and of vengeance, with the holy city, the holy land, as its playground.
