Iosi, the Remorseful Spy unearths an unsettling true story: that of José “Iosi” Pérez, an Argentine intelligence agent assigned to infiltrate the country’s Jewish community. Written by journalists Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzky, the book is a rigorous investigation and more — it’s an unthinkable confession, a portrait of a fractured identity, and a disturbing reckoning with one of Argentina’s darkest secrets.
Told through three interwoven perspectives, the book follows the arc of Pérez’s double life: his infiltration into the Jewish community in the late 1980s; the remorseful testimony he later gives to journalist Horacio Lutzky; and the investigation that unfolds when Miriam Lewin joins the effort to protect him and bring his story to light.
The narrative begins with José Pérez, who soon encounters a widespread antisemitic conspiracy theory among the federal police: the so-called “Andinia Plan” — a delusional belief that Argentina’s Jewish population was secretly plotting to seize control of Patagonia. Because of José’s curiosity about Judaism and his apparent lack of prejudice, he is chosen to investigate what his superiors believed was this “Zionist” secret plan.
Assuming the identity of “Iosi,” the son of a mixed couple and newly immersed in Jewish life, he slips easily into Buenos Aires’ Jewish community. He joins Jewish youth movements, makes Jewish friends, dates Jewish women, and eventually founds his own student group, Ofakim, which grows to become one of the most recognized Jewish university organizations of the early 1990s. By then, he speaks near-fluent Hebrew, celebrates Passover and Rosh Hashanah, worries about antisemitism, and falls deeply in love with Eli, a cheery, dedicated teacher at a Jewish elementary school.
Iosi’s involvement deepens as he rises through the ranks to secure a position at OSA (the Argentine Zionist Organization) and becomes active in AMIA and DAIA, Argentina’s most prominent Jewish institutions. He becomes “an Eli Cohen in reverse,” as he later reflects in conversation with Lutzky.
Everything seems to be going according to plan — until tragedy strikes.
In 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires is bombed. Two years later, a second terrorist attack destroys the AMIA building, killing 85 people. Iosi comes to a devastating realization: the information he had spent years compiling and sharing with the Argentine government — building layouts, institutional routines — may have helped to facilitate these attacks.
Doubt creeps in. What are his true loyalties? After the AMIA bombing, he works tirelessly to protect the community he is still surveilling, while continuing to report to a federal police force that begins to question his allegiances. The double life he has built starts to crumble, until it threatens to collapse entirely.
Desperate, he turns to journalists Horacio Lutzky and Miriam Lewin. Together, they try to help him seek asylum abroad so he can testify safely. But their efforts fail in a context where the AMIA case remains unsolved, without bringing any perpetrators to justice. Having Iosi relocated under a new identity in an unknown Argentine town, Lewin and Lutzky do the next best thing: they write this book — later adapted into a television series — offering Iosi’s testimony to the public, raw, conflicted, and filled with disturbing revelations.
This book is a page-turner steeped in romance, betrayal, and secrets. But it is, tragically, a very real and haunting portrait of a not-too-distant past — a sobering account of institutional betrayal and state complicity. As Lewin and Lutzky reconstruct Iosi’s story, they give voice to a man whose silence may have enabled horror, but whose testimony challenges the country’s official narrative and brings us closer to understanding an unresolved chapter in its history.
Jessica Ruetter is a writer and the founder of Bibliofilia, an online platform dedicated to Spanish-language literature. Through interviews with Latin American authors and book recommendations, she connects readers across the Hispanic world. She recently graduated from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
