read or could do math problems in his head. It was there I first got truly
40
interested in science. When I came across concepts I couldn’t understand, our
teachers always seemed able to answer my questions or help me find the
answers myself. I liked the school enormously. I might well have gone on to
finish my secondary education there. I probably should have. But the next year,
the kibbutz brought us back again.
One of the considerations was financial. Like many kibbutzim, Mishmar
Hasharon concluded that in order to make its school more economically
sustainable it would take in a number of “outside children” – yeldei chutz –
from towns and settlements around Israel. Yet this latest policy change was also
triggered a debate over the kind of education kibbutzim should provide. Should
a kibbutz school offer a curriculum tailored to passing the bagrut, the
matriculation exam, and going on to university? Or should it limit itself to a
fairly basic education geared to developing the talents needed for a productive
life on the kibbutz? In a series of heated debates in the dining hall, almost all of
Mishmar Hasharon supported the model of a basic, kibbutz-oriented education.
My father was the leading voice among the dissenters, and though it seemed
obvious he was fighting an uphill battle, I remember feeling a sense of pride at
watching him – and an echo in my own impulse to reach my own judgment
about issues and to act on it as I was growing older. Not only was he opposed to
the new policy. He was aghast. In the only time I can recall his speaking out at
one of the weekly kibbutz meetings, he asked how Mishmar Hasharon could
take upon itself the right to constrain an individual child’s life potential. “We
are Jews!” he said. “We are people who have left our impact on history through
our scholars, not our peasants. I can’t understand how we, who came here to
open a new chapter in the history of our people, can choose to keep our sons
and daughters from studying. We should encourage them to study!” He
accepted that the interests of the kibbutz mattered. But what kind of “model
society” would we be creating if we chose to “doom our own children to
ignorance, and cut them off from the great forward momentum of history in
Israel and the whole world?”
Especially in a kibbutz, however, the majority ruled. In this case, it was
nearly unanimous, my mother included. I could see she felt torn, whether
because she agreed with my father or because she realized how deeply he felt.
But she accepted the decision. For her, that was what was meant by being part
of the larger kibbutz family. Still, my father didn’t give up. He couldn’t change
the kibbutz’s ruling. But he tried to get me to stay at the regional high school. A
couple of years earlier, examiners had fanned out across Israel to administer its
41
first aptitude tests. I finished among the top two dozen results in the country.
“How can you throw your gifts away? For what,” he asked me. “If you leave
that school, and give up on going to university, it will be like betraying
yourself.” At one point, he walked me out to the patch of hard-packed soil
where we parked the tractors and farm machinery. “What do you want to do
with your life,” he asked. “Do you want to be a farmer?”
I thought about it before answering. “I don’t know what will happen in the
future,” I said. “But if you ask me now, I would say I want to drive one of the
kibbutz trucks.”
I could see the shock and disappointment in his eyes. But it was the truth. I
did imagine that at some point I might want to make a life outside the kibbutz.
But I’d never lived anywhere else. If I was going to remain a part of it, I could
think of no better way than to join our little corps of drivers. Though they lived
on the kibbutz, they spent most of their time delivering or picking up goods in
places like Tel Aviv, Holon or Ashkelon. As the US Marines might have put it,
I guess I figured I’d join the truck-drivers and see the world.
The deeper reason I said no to my father, as I am sure he suspected, was that
I felt a need to take control of my own life. That was simply a part of growing
up, a process which probably happened more quickly for 1950s kibbutz children
than for town or city kids. We loved and respected our parents. But we were
living with other teenagers. We weren’t just residents of the kibbutz. We were
part of the economic collective, working in the fields or orchards, the garage
and the metal shop. This bred a sense of independence. I listened to my father’s
arguments. But this was a decision about my future. I felt I had to make it for
myself. I cared about my education. But I’d reached a stage where my life
outside the classroom, and my circle of friends, mattered more. I am sure that
the same impulse drove me in my continuing freelance forays into lockpicking
and petty larceny with Ido and Moshe.
So I returned to the kibbutz school. The level of teaching was nowhere near
the regional school’s. But we did begin studying new subjects like economics
and politics. There were two other welcome surprises as well. The first was the
arrival of a new history teacher. Knowledgable, enthusiastic and eloquent, he
had a rare gift for igniting excitement in his students. We studied the French
Revolution. He brought it to life with insights into Montesquieu, Rousseau and
John Locke, Louis XVI and Mary Antoinette, Robespierre and Napoleon. He
traced the dynamics that led to the revolution, and the way its ideals descended
into the bloodshed and terror that followed. He presented history as a human
42
process that raised as many questions as it answered, as something we could
learn from.
The second high-point was a couple named David and Leah Zimmerman.
Though Mishmar Hasharon, like other kibbutzim, was secular, they introduced
us to the Talmud, the ancient compendium of rabbinic discussion and debate on
the meaning of passages from the Bible. We focused on two tractates, Baba
Kama and Baba Metziah, in which the rabbis drew on verses from Exodus to
argue out a system of rules for resolving civil disputes. It was the Talmud of
torts. The intricacy and the depth of the rabbinical debate fascinated me.
* * *
Yigal returned from the army a few months after the 1956 war, when, like
other teenagers, I was about to enter a pre-military program known as Gadna.
There were several options kids could choose. One was linked to the air force,
another to the navy. But most of us joined the reconnaissance and scouting
group, Gadna Sayerim. It involved studying topography and navigation, as well
as field exercises that were a lot like the ones Yigal had put us through a few
years earlier. At year’s end, we took part in a national exercise. It was called, a
bit grandiosely, Miyam el Yam: from sea to sea. We had to find our way from
the Mediterranean, near Haifa, across northern Israel to a lake which was a sea
only in name, the Sea of Galilee. It lasted three days. We were placed in teams
of four. We were each given a topographical map and a compass, with
landmarks marked along the way which we had to find and draw in a notebook
to prove we’d been there.
A couple of hours in, we faced our first challenge. We were making our way
along a shepherds’ trail, with brush and bramble on either side, when the path
split in two. We had to decide which fork to take. The map didn’t help. Each
inch covered the equivalent of a mile-and-a-half. The key was to be able to
match it with what we were seeing around us. To use points we could identify
from the map – Haifa and the sea in the receding distance, and a taller hill to our
northeast – and then figure out which path was more likely to take us in the
right direction. I knew this mix of calculation and imagination was something I
enjoyed. But it was more than that. Each of us had had the same preparation for
the exercise. As my trek-mates turned to me for this first decision, and then on
43
each successive stage as we crossed the Galilee, I realized that it was also
something that I was naturally good at.
Still, the closest thing to real military activity remained my excurions with
Ido and Moshe. Our ammunition trunks were stowed under our beds. But the
final piece of our arsenal fell into place in May 1958. For the tenth anniversary
of Israel, there was a national exhibition celebrating the achievements of the
state. I paid a first visit on my own. I was curious to see what was on show. But
as I walked through, I couldn’t help noticing the lack of security. Two days
later, I returned with Ido and Moshe. There was a stand devoted to the Israeli
military industry. We already had a supply of ammunition for an Uzi
submachine gun, courtesy of our raid on the Alexandroni Brigade. Now, when
the guy in charge of the stand was chatting with other visitors, we came away
with an Uzi.
It was then the trouble began. Along with Ido, Moshe and the other older
boys, I now lived in a larger dormitory under the cursory gaze of an older
metapelet. She was doing routine cleaning when she decided to dust around the
boxes under our beds. She’d never given them much thought. But when she
tried to move one of them, she was amazed by its weight. She got one her sonsin-law
to help. I think the box he pried open first was Moshe’s. But within a few
minutes he’d opened Ido’s and mine as well. Inside each were hundreds of
bullets and the machine-gun belts. Inside mine was our prized Uzi. It would not
exactly have taken the KGB to work out the rest. The kibbutz leaders ordered an
inquiry. Ido was summoned first, and attempted a brief show of defiance.
“What’s the big deal,” he asked. “It’s just stuff we collected. Why should you
care?” But separately questioning Moshe, then Ido again, the inquisitors worked
out every detail. The fact that the ammunition had come from the Alexandroni
Brigade, the reservists sent to defend us, was bad enough. But the Uzi had been
stolen from the National Exhibition. That was even worse. It was left to the core
of young men in their late 20s and 30s to figure out how to punish us. Everyone
agreed we could not be reported to the police. That would risk a scandal for the
kibbutz. They decided to beat some sense into the offenders, in front of all the
rest of the teenagers in the dormitory.
I wasn’t there. One afternoon each week, I now boarded a bus into Tel Aviv
for my piano lesson. But when I returned after sundown, I sensed immediately
something was wrong. Yigal was waiting at the bus stop outside the kibbutz. He
told me that what I had done was terrible. Not just because it involved weapons,
but because it was a breach of trust. Did you really steal ammunition from the
44
army, he asked, his voice rising. And from the National Exhibition? I didn’t
bother denying it. I suppose I felt lucky they hadn’t found out about our raids on
the kibbutz armory. He did not administer my beating. That came a few weeks
later from one of the kibbutz elders. He simply took me by the shoulders and
shouted: “You must never do this again.”
It was worse for my parents. At first, they believed I was an innocent party.
They were convinced I couldn’t have got involved in something like this
without being dragged in by the others. My father even asked me whether the
reason I’d been “drafted” by Ido and Moshe was because I was small, and able
to squeeze through tight spaces in windows and doors. As it happened, that did
sometimes come in handy. But I told them, no, I was not an unlucky bystander.
I was as much a part of it as the others. My father was angrier than I had ever
seen him. My mother, faced with what must have seemed like a betrayal of
every one of her Zionist principles, told me that if the kibbutz had decided to
report us to the police, she would not have objected.
Their mood lifted slightly when I began my final year of high school in
September 1958. After two years back in the kibbutz school, our age-group was
sent out again in another shift in policy. This one was in response to signs of
growing support in Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim for the argument
my father had made against the quality of education we were offering. In order
to go at least some way toward meeting that objection, Mishmar Hasharon was
banding together with two dozen other kibbutzim and sending all 12 th -graders to
one of two outside high schools. The first, called Beit Berl, was a Labor Zionist
institution focusing on the humanities. In addition to a few of the less academic
boys, most of the girls were sent there. The rest of us went to a place called
Rupin. It was a few hundred yards past the regional high school. It specialized
in agriculturally related scientific research.
A few of the teachers were enormously gifted, and they were in the areas
that most interested me: math, physics and biology. Yet the rest of the
curriculum was almost numbingly uninspiring. I did not miss a single math or
science class. But otherwise, I began setting my own schedule. Some days, I
would sleep late, or not go at all. When I did go, I’d often show up without
having done the homework. Neither Ido nor Moshe was with me at Rupin. They
were starting their military service. But I assembled a new band of mischiefmakers,
and it was not hard to entice them to go AWOL.
I was warned several times by the school administrator. He said he could not
accommodate a student who seemed oblivious to, or dismissive of, the rules. He
45
was especially upset because my attitude seemed to be infecting others. A few
months into the school year, he told the leaders of Mishmar Hasharon, and then
my parents, that I would have to leave. My father was especially upset. A
couple of years earlier, he’d had visions of my staying on in the regional high
school and going to university. Now, I’d been unable to hold my own in Rupin.
Still, both he and my mother were relieved when Mishmar Hasharon and the
school worked out a compromise which did not end my studies altogether. The
expulsion stood, but I was allowed to continue attending math and science
classes.
For my mother, the blow was softened by the fact I began working almost
full-time on the kibbutz, alongside Yigal, driving a tractor. I woke up early and
accompanied him into the fields of wheat, barley or rye. We also made a series
of trips 130 miles south into the Negev to a moshav called Patish. It had been
set up by newly arrived Moroccan Jews. Since they didn’t have the equipment
or know-how to cultivate all their fields, they were renting out some of the land.
Mishmar Hasharon had contracted to farm a parcel of 450 acres.
For ten days at a time, Yigal and I would place a tractor on the back of a
pickup and head to Patish. We worked from four in the morning until sundown.
After work, we ate at a tiny family-run restaurant a few miles away in Ofakim, a
so-called “development town” populated by Moroccan Jews who had been
moved there as soon as they arrived in Israel. Far from regretting not being in
school, I drew satisfaction, and pride, from knowing that I was functioning as an
independent adult. But it also gave me time to think. My whole life had been
circumscribed by the struggle to create and secure the state. But I again found
myself pondering issues of basic fairness in our young country, and the
challenge of reconciling our words and principles with our deeds amid the
difficult realities of building the state.
Back on the kibbutz, it was the example of the kindly and hard-working
Baddura which had caused me to question how we were treating the Jews who
had arrived from Yemen. In the Negev, I met members of the even larger postwar
influx from Morocco. One image struck me above all. It was from the place
Yigal and I ate dinner. Ofakim was a development town that had yet to develop.
It had no visible means of support, and there was no sign the government was
doing much to remedy that or integrate the new immigrants economically and
socially. The “restaurant” was a side business a family had set up in the dining
room of their tiny home. The sixth or seventh time we went there, I was startled
by sudden movement a couple of feet away from where we were sitting.
46
Looking more closely, I saw a wooden box, the kind we used in Mishmar
Hasharon to crate oranges. It was filled with hay. At first, I thought the stirring
inside was a family pet. Then, I saw it was a baby. I said nothing until we had
left. “Was that really a child?” I asked Yigal. “A baby?” He replied, with a tinge
of sadness but also a look that seemed to convey surprise at my naivety: “Yes.
They don’t have room for him.”
* * *
My evolving feelings about the Arabs, the other people with dreams of what
they still saw as Palestine, would become more complex as my childhood drew
to an end. As mentioned, I barely registered the fate of the absent villagers of
Wadi Khawaret.
And yet as I got older – in my teens – I came to understand why the
Palestinians were fighting us. Before the 1956 war, Dayan gave a brief speech
that had a powerful impact on me. It was a eulogy, but it was for someone
Dayan didn’t know personally. His intended audience was the rest of the
country. He spoke in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza often
targeted by fedayeen. In April 1956, a group of Arabs crossed from Gaza and
began cutting down the wheat in Nahal Oz’s fields. The kibbutz security officer,
a 21-year-old named Roi Rotberg, rode out on horseback to chase them away.
The intruders opened fire as soon as he got close. They beat him, shot him dead
and took the body back over the armistice line. The corpse was returned,
mutilated, after an Israeli protest through the UN.
With Israeli newspapers full of agonized accounts of what had happened,
Dayan’s message was that we should not blame the Arabs for Roi Rotberg’s
death. We should look at ourselves, and the neighborhood in which we lived.
“Why should we talk about their burning hatred for us?” he asked. “For eight
years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their
eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their
fathers dwelt.” Of course, they hated us and the state we were building. Rotberg
had allowed his “yearning for peace to deafen his ears, and he did not hear the
voice of murder waiting in ambush.” Dayan said the danger was that other
Israelis had become similarly naive. “How did we shut our eyes, and refuse to
see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation?” A generation which was
47
settling the land but which, “without the steel helmet and the barrel of the gun,
will not succeed in planting a tree or building a home.”
Still, if I was part of a generation that understood the need for military
preparedness, strength and a readiness to fight if we were to survive in the
Middle East, the 1956 war also brought home to me the need to consider how
we fought. This meant grappling with a contradiction wired into Zionism from
the start: the need to take up arms to defend our state, while recognizing the
Jewish moral code that was its foundation. When the Israeli armed forces were
established in 1948, Tzahal’s doctrine included the principle of tohar haneshek
– “purity of arms” – and an explicit requirement for our soldiers to use the
minimum necessary force and do all they could to avoid civilian casualties.
Putting “purity of arms” into practice was always going to be hard. All arms
kill. In all wars, civilians die. But that did not make the principle, or the need to
be aware of it in combat, any less important.
Even if the soldier called on the make that judgment was someone who had
mentored me from the time I was six, and whose military prowess I had come to
respect. Even if it was Yigal Garber. His parachute jump on the first day of the
1956 war went smoothly. But the battle for control of the Mitla Pass turned out
to be the most deadly of the war. It was also unnecessary. Under Israel’s prewar
choreography with the British and French, the very fact of our landing near
the Mitla Pass was to be the trigger for an Anglo-French attack. In fact, Arik
Sharon, the commander of Battalion 890, received orders from Tel Aviv not to
take the pass. Only grudgingly, did they let him send in a reconnaissance force
to establish whether it was safe to cross.
The reconnaissance company walked into a trap. Machine-gun and mortar
fire rained down from Egyptian troops dug into the caves and other natural
defensive positions above the pass. It took hours to extricate the stranded men.
Yigal’s unit fought its way in from the eastern side of the pass. A small group
from the reconnaissance force managed to get a foothold on the western side.
Almost 250 Egyptians were killed. But 38 Israeli paratroopers also died, the
largest single toll in any battle since 1948. Battered and bitter, the surviving
men from the reconnaissance force parachuted into the southernmost part of the
Sinai, near Et-Tur on the Red Sea. Yigal and the others headed overground to
join up with them. By the time they got there, Egyptian resistance had all but
ended. Yigal’s company had a brief exchange of fire with several dozen holdouts
in the Egyptian force. The Egyptians surrendered. And then, apparently,
Yigal and his fellow paratroopers shot all of them dead.
48
At least those were the rumors after the war. I asked friends what they were
hearing. I asked some of the older men on the kibbutz, my father included. All
of them responded with a slightly different version of events. But I knew what I
wasn’t hearing. No one of them told me it was a lie. When I asked Yigal, he
averted my glance, and then changed the subject. I knew it was true, at least
broadly.
I realized that, before it happened, Yigal and the others had seen dozens of
friends gunned down in an Egyptian ambush in the Mitla Pass. But I didn’t need
a lesson tohar haneshek to know that the killing of captured Egyptian soldiers
should not have happened. Or that it was plainly, simply wrong.
When Yigal and I made our final trip to Patish in 1959, I knew it would be
pointless to ask him about it. Whatever he said wouldn’t change anything. I still
respected his courage and his fighting spirit, and the part he’d played in
defending Israel. I appreciated what he’d done for me as I grew up. But what
mattered now wasn’t what Yigal had done. It was what I would do, and how I
would live my life.
Especially since I, too, was about to begin my army service.
49
Chapter Three
I reported for induction on the second Sunday of November 1959, three
months short of my eighteenth birthday. Military service was a near-universal
rite of passage for Israeli teenagers. For children of the kibbutz, it held even
greater significance. Now that we had a country, the kibbutzniks’ role as the
avant-garde in taming and farming the land had ceased to be relevant. But the
sense of mission we’d been raised with – what we were led to believe set us
apart from the mere “city-dwellers” – drove us to aspire, maybe even assume,
we would leave an imprint in other spheres of the new state’s life. I doubt it’s an
accident that nearly every one of the boys with whom I grew up in Mishmar
Hasharon went on to become an officer during his time in the military.
Judging from my own first few weeks in uniform, however, there was every
reason to believe I would end up as an unfortunate, undistinguished exception.
This was not due to lack of ambition. In fact, I thought at first of joining the
air force. But a question on the application form asked whether I ever suffered
from any breathing discomfort. Like almost everyone on the kibbutz, I did get a
bit clogged up when the weather turned cold and damp. So I naively answered
yes, ending any chance of training as a pilot. My fallback choice was a tank
unit. But when I joined the hundreds of other draftees at the processing center
near Tel Aviv, about a hundred of us were shunted, by alphabetical lottery, into
training for armored personnel carriers instead. Known as battle taxis, the APCs
which Israel had at the time were lumbering, World War Two-vintage
halftracks.
Our training battalion was based, alongside the country’s main armored
brigade, in a huge, hillside army camp outside Beersheva in the Negev. I knew
that our tironut – basic training – would be tough. That was the whole point.
But we endured a seemingly endless array of inspections, under the watchful
eye of a corporal who meted out punishments for the tiniest scuff on a boot, a
belt, or a rifle. The rest of the time was spent in physical training, which I found
especially hard, at least at the beginning. I still weighed barely 130 pounds, and
by no means all, or even most, of it was muscle. My military career, such as it
was, looked very likely to involve spending my required couple of years baking
inside an APC in the Negev before moving on to something more useful, and
certainly more fulfilling, with the rest of my life.
50
But a series of accidents, in Israel’s life and in mine, would soon point me in
a dramatically different direction. The first became known as the Rotem Crisis,
and it delivered a jolting reminder of Israel’s vulnerability to a surprise attack
from neighboring Arab states. Militarily, we were far stronger than in 1948. But
we were still a young country, at an early stage in our economic development.
Our defense strategy rested on a recognition we could not afford to sustain a
large standing army, relying instead on a pool of trained reservists. The problem
was that a full call-up of the reserves would require something like 48 hours.
That meant some form of early warning was critical.
Rotem erupted in February 1960, about halfway through my tironut, and
began almost farcically. The Chief of Military Intelligence, Chaim Herzog, was
at a diplomatic receiption in Tel Aviv when he began chatting with a guest he
knew well: the head of the local CIA station. What, the American asked, did he
make of the fact that Egypt had moved its two main armored divisions into the
Sinai, toward the border with Israel? Herzog came up with a suitably woolly
reply, about how it was obviously a situation which bore watching. But the truth
was that neither he nor anyone else in Israel had any idea about the Egyptian
mobilization. He left the party as soon as he could, to tell Dayan and Ben-
Gurion. When a reconnaissance flight the next day confirmed that dozens of
battle-ready tanks had been rolled forward toward the Suez Canal, Ben-Gurion
and the generals scrambled for a response.
They did not want a war. Ben-Gurion was particularly worried that in
responding to Nasser’s buildup, he might inadvertently escalate things further.
He vetoed the idea of a full mobilization. But he did order a more limited callup,
of about 7,000 reservists. He placed the air force on alert. He directed the
four brigades responsible for the defense of southern Israel, including our
armored brigade near Beersheva, to move within a few miles of the border –
and gave us the additional role of sending several overnight munitions convoys
to equip the hastily assembled border force.
The first sign I saw that anything extraordinary was going on was the sudden
movement of tanks and APCs inside our camp. At first, no one told us raw
recruits anything. We were left to look on, and stay out of the way. But with our
operational units preparing to move forward, the problem was that there seemed
no one else with the expertise, experience and local knowledge to lead the
supply columns. So our training battalion was summoned before the platoon
commander. “Any volunteers,” he asked. When none of us raised a hand, he
said: “Come on. One of you must have grown up around here. That means the
51
first 25 miles will be familiar territory.” He left unspoken the obvious
postscript: the need to negotiate the final five to ten miles, through open desert,
and to find the right area, on our side of a border that wasn’t even marked.
“Can’t any of you,” he barked, “lead a convoy of a few dozen trucks?”
I’m not sure what possessed me. But I thought to myself: yes, I probably
can. I had been scouting and navigating in one way or another since those first
evenings with Yigal in the kibbutz orchards. I’d trained with Gadna Sayerim.
And while I’d never lived in the south, the farm settlement of Patish, where I’d
worked along with Yigal after getting kicked out of high school, was not far
from the route the conveys would have to take.
So I raised my hand.
“Can you lead a convoy?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Of course, I’ll need a map. And a compass.”
“Why do you think you’re qualified?” he prodded. I’d been in Gadna
Sayerim, I said. I was good with maps. “Okay,” he replied, and he sent me,
along with two of the company’s junior officers, to the battalion commander.
Someone must have phoned ahead, because he was clearly expecting us.
Still, I could see the surprise in his eyes when he looked at me: only just
eighteen, but looking closer to 15, my uniform sagging on my slender frame. He
gazedat the officers, then back at me, then at the officers again, as if trying to
figure out whether he was about to approve something utterly crazy. But he had
little choice. Three convoys had to be dispatched within the next couple of
hours. So far, with me, he had a sum total of one guy to lead them. “Fine,” he
said, and waved us out.
The column consisted of eight huge, American-made six-wheelers, each
packed with ten tons of munitions and other supplies. I was in the lead truck.
The driver was a reservist in his mid-30s. So were most of the men in the rest of
the transport trucks, one driver and one soldier in each. A staff sergeant, in the
second vehicle, was in theoretical command. But, surreal though it felt, I was
actually in charge, since I was the only person who might, conceivably, get us
to the right place.
The platoon commander was right. The first part, on paved roads, was fairly
easy. But just before sunset, we reached open desert, the beginning of more than
three hours of picking and weaving, calibrating and recalibrating, our way
across a wide expanse on sand and occasional scrub bushes that, every mile or
52
so, would suddenly give way to a windswept series of dunes and wadis. The
map and compass helped. But I soon realized that it was almost impossible to
get an accurate reading from inside the truck. Every few minutes, I waved the
convoy to stop, got out, and walked fifty or sixty yards into the sand and clumps
of acacia trees and calibrated our progress from there. My fallback was the
stars. From them, I could at least make sure we were headed in broadly the right
direction. But the need to navigate around the dunes meant we were never
moving in a perfectly straight line. The miles ticking by on the truck’s odometer
couldn’t tell me exactly how far we’d travelled. A couple of times, I realized we
were wandering off line – not by a much, but enough to risk leaving us either a
mile or two south of where we were supposed to go or, worse, on the Egyptian
side of an unmarked desert frontier that, especially at night, would look pretty
much the same on either side.
Finally, a few hours before dawn, I brought the convoy to a halt. I climbed
out, walked back to the staff sergeant and told him, with more confidence than I
felt: “We’re here.” I had no way of knowing for sure. But I felt we were
generally in the right place. Before we’d set off, I was briefed by the officer in
charge of one of the operational APC battalions. He had been to the area before,
on training exercises. Because of the emergency call-up, he was too senior to
lead a supply convoy. But he told me that once we got there, we should stop and
wait. He would follow our tracks the next morning and link up with us. An hour
after sunrise, we saw his jeep bobbing over the sand towards us. He pulled to a
stop, shook hands with the staff sergeant, and then he turned to me.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “We’re where we need to be.”
Our role in the grand scheme of things, and certainly mine, was hardly
decisive. But the rest of the border mobilization also went to plan. That, along
with some frantic diplomatic activity and a healthy common sense on all sides,
ensured that a new war with Egypt was averted – at least for a further halfdozen
years, until 1967. By then, the lesson of Rotem would be learned: our
need to find a realiable way to tap into the battle plans of the hostile Arab states
around us. And through another wholly unexpected turn of events starting just a
few weeks after the Rotem Crisis, I would turn out to play a personal role in
making that happen.
* * *
53
Under army regulations, training recruits got a five-day leave every few
months during tironut. My first one came a bit later than usual, due to Rotem.
But in April 1960, shortly before the Passover holiday, I headed back to
Mishmar Hasharon. Despite my minor triumph of desert navigation, I still had
every reason to believe I’d be spending the next couple of years in an APC unit
in the Negev, and can’t pretend I was looking forward to it. Still, the idea of
returning home in my army uniform, at least a bit stronger and bulkier than
before, did give me a sense of pride.
It was on my third day back, when I was in the dining hall with a half-dozen
schoolmates-turned-soldiers, that Avraham Ramon sat down and joined us. He
was a yeled chutz, one of the “boys from outside” who had joined our class
when we were taken out of the regional high school. He, too, was now in the
army. As we were finishing lunch, he asked me: “How’s tironut?”
“Tough,” I said. “Boring.”
Smiling, he said: “How would you feel about joining a sayeret?”
The question took me by surprise. In Hebrew, sayeret meant “reconnaissance
unit”. It was the name given to special units that carried out missions behind
enemy lines, or under particularly exacting conditions. In the early 1960s, there
were only two of note. One was Sayeret Golani, attached to the Golani Brigade
near the northern border. The truly elite one was Sayeret Tzanhanim, the
paratroopers’ sayeret. It had been built from Company A of Battalion 890,
where Yigal had served in the 1950s.
“Which sayeret?” I asked.
“It’s called Sayeret Matkal,” he replied.
I’d never heard of it. When I asked what it did, he said: “I’m not allowed to
say. But are you interested?” The air of mystery made it seem only more
enticing. And no matter what it did, it had to be a step up from what lay ahead
of me in the Negev. “Yeah. Sure,” I replied.
I heard nothing further in the days after I got back to Beersheva. But at the
end of the month, I was ordered to report to a small hut in an army base near Tel
Aviv. It belonged to Maka Esser, the personnel department of military
intelligence. I was greeted by two men in their late 20s. One of them, shorter
even than me, introduced himself as Sami Nachmias. The other was tall and
slim and said in a surprisingly quiet voice: “I’m Shmil Ben-Zvi.” They were
two names which I, like most Israeli teenagers at the time, knew well. Ben-Zvi
54
had been an officer in Arik Sharon’s original Unit 101, and Nachmias was one
of the earliest recruits to Company A. They shook my hand and motioned me
into a Jeep. As we drove out of the base, they peppered me with questions about
almost anything except the army: the kibbutz, school, sports. Then, Ben-Zvi
pulled the Jeep to the side of the road, turned around to face me and asked: “Is it
true you can pick locks?”
Yes, I said. “Do you want me to show you?” He said that wouldn’t be
necessary.
“Is it true you can navigate? Read maps?” Nachmias asked. I said yes.
They drove me back to the base in silence. “OK,” Nachmias said. “You’ll
probably hear from us.”
I didn’t. But as basic training was winding down, I got a further order: to
report to an address in Tzahala, a neighborhood in north Tel Aviv where a lot of
military officers lived. It was a small house with a metal gate outside. I was met
at the door by a man about 30 in shorts and a T-shirt who introduced himself as
Avraham Arnan. He led me inside. He unfurled a map of Jerusalem and the
surrounding hills. He pointed to a spot on the southwest of the city. He drew a
wide, curving line through the hills to a second point. “You know how to read a
map?” he asked. When I nodded, he said: “I want you to describe to me – just as
if you were walking on this line – exactly what you see, as you make your way
to the place I marked.” I used the elevation lines on the map as a guide, and the
positioning of the hills and woodland and villages on the map, and began
describing how each stage would look. When I was finished, his only response
was the hint of a smile. When he spoke, it wasn’t about the map. It was, again,
about picking locks. “How did you learn?” he asked. I explained how I’d cut
into the locks, figured out how they worked and made a set of tools to open
them. “Thank you,” he said. “You can return to your unit.”
Though he hadn’t said so, I got a feeling this was the Sayeret Matkal
equivalent of a final job interview. When I got back to Beersheva, I dug around
as discreetly as possible for details about Avraham Arnan. I learned he had
served in 1948 in the hills around Jerusalem, so he would have known first-hand
the terrain he asked me to describe. That, I guessed, explained the half-smile.
But I was entering my last week of tironut. I still had no idea whether I’d be
spending the next couple of years inside an APC – or in a sayeret whose
function was a mystery, beyond the fact it seemed less interested in whether my
boots were shined than whether I could pick a lock.
55
The day before the end of basic training, I was told to return to Maka Esser.
A Jeep was waiting. A soldier was at the wheel. He mumbled hello and drove
me to a sprawling military base about 15 minutes away, not too far from the
international airport in Lod. It was built by the British in the Second World War
for the RAF. After 1948, the main part had been converted into Israel’s officertraining
school. But at the far end, set back from a criss-cross of runways, was a
pair of domed concrete shelters which had been used by the British for
munitions storage. Five tents. Two field toilets. And a single-story brick
structure with a tin roof. It contained offices for Avraham Arnan, a couple of
other officers and a secretary, a kitchenette and a room for storing weapons.
This was the home of Sayeret Matkal, although the first thing I was told was
that no one, outside a handful of senior officers in military headquarters, knew
we existed.
* * *
The heart and soul of Sayeret Matkal was Avraham Arnan. Even from my
brief first encounter with him in his living room in Tzahala, I was struck by his
physical presence, with almost movie-star looks and a face made even more
intriguing by the fact he had different-colored eyes, one brown and one a
piercing green. But what really set him apart, as I got to know him and come
under his spell in the sayeret, was his playful, almost bohemian disregard for the
normal strictures and structures, rules and regulations, of the armed forces.
What mattered to him was what actually needed to get done, and how best to
accomplish it despite all the bureaucratic obstacles, and he made me and his
other teenage recruits feel we were equal partners with him in getting there.
Years later, he confided that if his life had not led him into the military, he
would have probably chosen something in the arts or culture, maybe directing
films. But he had volunteered for the Haganah at age 17, a year before the 1948
war. As the losses mounted in Jerusalem, he found himself in the Palmach’s
crack Harel Brigade, under the command of a future Israeli chief-of-staff, Dado
Elazar.
His vision for Sayeret Matkal became Israel’s answer to the dangers
identified by Rotem. But it had its origins in his experiences in the years after
1948, when he joined a military intelligence group running a loose network of
Arab agents across Israel’s northern border. They provided occasional bits of
56
information. But in talking with his wartime friends, he realized this kind of
low-level intelligence could never address the real need for Israel: to ensure we
had early warning if Syria or Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt, were preparing to go to
war against us.
He began toying with the idea of training a small force of Israeli soldiers to
go on cross-border intelligence missions. The initial response from the kirya –
military headquarters in Tel Aviv – was so frustrating that anyone else would
have given up. None of the generals saw any reason to believe his scheme
would work. But the real obstacle was their continuing trauma over what had
happened the last time Israeli soldiers crossed the border on an intelligence
mission. It had happened in 1954, and it ended in a failure even more serious
than Rotem. The target was the Golan Heights, inside Syria. The special
technology unit attached to military intelligence had developed a bugging
device designed to be placed on a telephone pole on the Golan. The task of
installing it was given to the most decorated, and respected, commando unit in
the army: Company A in Sharon’s paratroop battalion, led by its commander,
Meir Har-Zion.
On a spring night in 1954, Har-Zion led his team onto the Golan. They
rigged the bugging unit to the telephone pole, buried the bulky transmitter and
made their way back. And it worked. Israeli intelligence could listen in to
military communications on the Heights. The hitch as that the batteries had to
be replaced every few weeks. Several more times, Meir and his men sneaked
back into Syria to keep the bug working. But as commander of Company A,
Meir was a key part of Israel’s anti-fedayeen operations. The last thing Moshe
Dayan wanted to risk was seeing him captured while trying to replace a few
batteries. So he shifted the task to a regular unit from the Golani Brigade.
In December 1954, a handover mission was organized. Three men from
Company A, including one of Meir’s sergeants, joined three from the Golani
Brigade. But they didn’t even hold a joint exercise before setting off. There was
also a lack of clarity about who was in charge. Though the Golani commander
was nominally the senior officer, only the Company A men had any first-hand
experience of this kind of mission. A half-mile onto the Heights, they were
intercepted by a Syrian soldiers. If this had been a Company A operation, the
response would have been automatic. They would have wheeled, opened fire
and attacked. But when the Syrians ordered the Golanis to drop their weapons,
one of them did, and the Company A men followed suit. They were all taken to
Damascus, held in solitary confinement, beaten and tortured.
57
One of the captured Golani soldiers was a 19-year-old named Uri Ilan, the
son of a member of the Israeli Knesset whom Ben-Gurion and the whole of the
government knew well. The soldiers’ captivity dragged on until they were
finally returned to Israel in March 1956. By then, however, Uri Ilan had hanged
himself. He managed to hide a note into his uniform. It was found when the
body was being prepared for burial. It read: Lo bagadeti. Nekamah. “I did not
betray anything. Revenge.”
Ever since the Uri Ilan mission, there had been a de facto ban on crossborder
intelligence operations by Israeli soldiers. Ben-Gurion and his military
commanders knew, of course, the importance of getting early warning of an
enemy attack. But they decided the price of possible failure was simply too
high.
Sayeret Matkal was born three years later. Avraham was still part of the unit
running low-level agents in Syria and Lebanon, but his commander reluctantly
agreed to allow him to set up his new intelligence group. His initial
“headquarters” was a sparsely furnished Tel Aviv apartment. The first people he
brought in were veterans of the Palmach’s Arab Platoon, pre-state fighters who
trained themselves to pass as Arabs and gather intelligence, or stage raids,
behind enemy lines. Next, he invited friends who had served in Unit 101 and
Company A. Finally, he enlisted a core of them to help train recruits to his new
sayeret. He hoped the involvement of these commando veterans would also give
the unit credibility inside the kirya. One of them, Micha Kapusta, had been part
of 101, as had Itzhak Gibli, who had been a teenage Palmachnik in 1948. A
third was another Company A officer named Aharon Eshel, known as Errol, in
part for his undeniably Errol Flynn-like swagger, but also an acronym of his
Hebrew name. But the crowing addition to the group had the distinction of
having led the last successful Israeli bugging mission on the Golan, in addition
to being the most respected commando in Israel, a man who Dayan would later
call the country’s greatest soldier. It was Meir Har-Zion himself.
* * *
I was part of the second group of recruits to Sayeret Matkal, in the early
summer of 1960. The unit had been given its own base barely a year earlier. Bu
it had yet to carry out a single mission, and there was no sign of that happening.
Avraham couldn’t be sure when, or if, the generals in the kirya might give him
58
the go-ahead. Still, he was convinced that if we could demonstrate a toughness,
commitment and competence which offered an obvious addition to Israel’s
intelligence capability, even they would recognize the folly of not using it.
He made every one of us feel a part of making this possible. I was one of ten
new recruits, bringing the size of the sayeret to twenty. We were almost all
teenagers. In fact, the oldest of our officers was 21. Most of the men were
Sephardi Jews. For a unit like ours, with the aim of undertaking secret missions
in Arab countries, Avraham believed that a background in Arabic culture and
language was an important asset. I was the sayeret’s only lock-picker. But all of
us had been recruited in the much same way that I was. It was how the top
Palmach units had been formed, and the way Sharon assembled Unit 101:
friends recommending friends, in my case, my old yeled chutz schoolmate from
the kibbutz.
We trained in the whole range of commando skills. We used not only Uzis,
but Soviet-made Kalashnikovs and Gurionov machine guns. We worked with
detonators and explosives. We staged raids on Israeli airfields. We conducted
exercises using rubber dinghies to practice attacking from the sea. But mostly
we walked. For hundreds of miles, almost always at night the length and breadth
of the country. We would study a map of each area, committing every town or
village, hilltop or dry creek bed, to memory before we set off. I can still
remember what Meir Har-Zion told us: to be truly prepared, you needed to
spend “an hour for an hour” – an equal time mastering the lay of the land to the
amount you’d need to carry out an operation. It was a gruelling regime –
designed to push us to the very limits of endurance. On one series of exercises,
we were limited to a single canteen of water as we trekked deep into the Negev
Desert. It was gruelling, designed to push us to the very limits of endurance. I
remember the first time Errol set eyes on me after I joined the unit. He turned to
Avraham, laughed, and said: “Are we taking high school kids now?” But before
long, I was a “high school kid” no longer.
Meir Har-Zion rarely took a direct part in our exercises. On his final
Company A mission, a month before the 1956 war, he had been shot in his
throat and arm. A medic saved his life by performing a tracheotomy. But his
speech was affected, and he still had almost no use of his right arm. Errol,
Micha Kapusta and Yitzhak Gibli were more actively involved with us. They
were there not only to help train us, but to instill a commando attitude, a spirit
of confidence bordering on bravado.
59
Kapusta was our guide on our punishing five-day treks through the Negev.
Though Avraham would see us off at the start, he stayed back at the base. In a
couple of the exercises, we relied on carrier pigeons to keep in touch with the
base, until Kapusta began killing them for dinner. Once, on a searingly hot
desert afternoon, hours from the nearest hospital, he spotted a poisonous snake.
He used pieces of wood to pry its head up from the sand, grabbed its neck and
strangled it.
We also studied some Arabic, though most of the Sephardi recruits already
spoke the language. My tutor was a Cairo-born Jew named Amin. In part
because he enjoyed mathematics and played the violin, we hit it off
immediately. He was also deaf in one ear. Languages have never been my forte.
Even in Hebrew, I have a slight lisp. That made mastering Arabic even harder.
Still, Amin would frequently compliment me on my accent, at which point the
others in the class would point out that I was lucky he was hard of hearing.
A year in, we were given a classroom briefing on what to do if we fell into
enemy hands. The gist was to tell them only our name, rank and serial number.
But we had a special session with Gibli, who told us about what captivity was
really like. He had been shot and wounded during a retaliation operation in 1954
and was captured by the Jordanians. Until his release, he was kept in solitary
confinement and tortured. The details of his imprisonment, the beatings and the
cigarette burns, were lurid. Partly because we were developing a bit of
commando self-confidence – but mostly to hide the discomfort of wondering
how each of us would react to being in enemy hands – we heckled him over an
account that seemed to get more heroic with each retelling. He wisely ignored
us. He told us that survival would be down not just to physical strength. It
required strength of mind, the kind of subtlety required to give your captors
something to keep them at bay and to establish some form of human bond, to
but withhold anything of genuine value.
A few weeks later, the whole sayeret held a four-day exercise in the Galilee.
On the second night, at about four in the morning, we shook off our backpacks
and settled in for a few hours’ sleep. The first thing I heard was shouting in
Arabic. I saw a guy hovering over me, his face covered. He handcuffed me,
pulled a burlap sack over my head, yanked me to me feet and led me off. We
were piled into the back of a truck. From the whispered comments around me, I
assumed all twenty of us had been taken. We drove for nearly four hours.
Twice, I got an slap across the face, more painful because of the burlap. I kept
60
telling myself this had to be part of our training. If it was for real, we’d have
been more badly beaten, or killed. Still, I couldn’t be completely sure.
The truck lurched to a stop. We were led into a building, down a hallway and
into a large room. The walls were bare except for a series of iron rings. Our
captors tore the sacks from our heads for a few moments, and tied our wrists to
the manacles. For the first six or seven hours we were kept together, arms
shackled and raised. Then they took us away one by one. I was the last to be led
out. I was taken to a room so small there was not even space for a cot. It wasn’t
until the last shaft of light disappeared from the slit-like window near the top of
wall that the first interrogator showed up. He unlocked the door, entered and
unfolded a metal chair. He wanted answers: what unit was I from, what did our
unit do, who were our commanders, what were our orders, and what was our
designated role in the event of war.
I told him my name, rank and serial number. After each question, I repeated
them, or shook my head in silence. “You will answer, sooner or later,” he
shouted in heavily Arabic-accented Hebrew, hitting me across the face. “All of
you will.” For four days and nights, other interrogators shouted out the same
questions. I was slapped dozens of times. Punched in the stomach. One of the
captors uncuffed me and bent my arm behind my back, wrenching it upward.
Though I was determined not to cry out, I grunted in pain. Over and over, I told
myself: “This is not for real. They can hurt me. But they have limits. They can
twist my arm. They can hurt me. But there’s no way they can break my arm.”
I was not allowed to sleep. I was never left alone for more than a half-hour.
If I was crouching on the stone floor, I would be yanked to my feet and punched
or slapped. Twice a day, I was taken from my cell to a primitive toilet and given
a minute to relieve myself. There were only two changes to the routine. On a
few occasions, five or six of us were brought back into the large room and told
we wouldn’t be let go until we had given them more of what they wanted – the
implication being that some of us had already talked. And once or twice, the
interrogators sent in a good cop. “I can help you,” he told me. “But you have to
give me something.”
But when it was over, none of us had talked. We didn’t fool ourselves into
thinking that meant we could hold up in genuine captivity. There, they could
break your arm. They could burn your chest with cigarettes, rip out a fingernail
or a tooth. They could kill you. The main value had been to give us some sense
of what we might face. We might still be afraid, but at least it would no longer
be fear of the unknown.
61
Challenging though our training was, I found every bit of it enthralling and,
with each new test passed, somehow empowering and exhilirating. This was all
the more remarkable because we had still yet to carry out a single operation. If
anyone other than Avraham had been in charge, I think the unit might have
unraveled. The fact that it didn’t was mostly due to of the ethos he created, the
feeling that we were a special breed with a critically important common
purpose, and that sooner or later we would be called on to do special things.
When we were in uniform, it was camouflage dress. When we were on the base,
we mostly wore sandals and shorts. We called each other by our first names,
even the officers.
In its first few years, the sayeret sometimes felt less like an army unit than a
college fraternity. Every spring, we organized a feast in a cavernous hangar on
the edge of our compound. It was called Chag ha Pri, the Feast of the Fruit. For
days ahead of the event, we would mount night raids on kibbutzim, “liberating”
crates of every kind of fruit imaginable, and chicken and lamb if we got lucky.
The only rule was that none of us would steal from our own kibbutzim. Among
the guests at the Feast of the Fruit was an unsuspecting selection of senior
officers whom Avraham knew. A few of them got into the spirit, like Dado
Elazar, his Palmach commander from 1948. The Palmach had held similar
foodfests, with delicacies grabbed from nearby kibbutzim. Dado was by this
time commander of Israel’s armored corps. Since our sayeret was always short
of gasoline for our exercises, he would divert surplus supplies to us. But other
guests were less impressed with the pyramids of oranges and avocados and
mangoes and watermelons. I could almost hear a voice screaming inside them:
these are Israeli soldiers. They’re stealing this stuff.
* * *
It was not until the autumn of 1961, nearly eighteen months after I arrived,
that it seemed we might actually be given a real mission. This was largely due
to a change at the top of the military. For much of the 1950s, when Dayan was
chief-of-staff, his right-hand-man was a Haganah veteran named Meir Amit. In
1961, the term of Dayan’s successor as chief of staff, Haim Laskov, was coming
to an end and Amit was in the mix to get the top job. He was already Head of
Operations. In practical terms, that made him the number-two man in the armed
forces. But the job went to Tzvi Tzur, Laskov’s deputy. Amit decided to accept
62
the post of Head of Military Intelligence. He knew the importance of
intelligence, and the potential cost of Israel being taken by surprise in a future
war, having been part of the top military leadership during Rotem. He was
energetic, bright, and exuded an infectious sense of self-confidence and
authority. He also had clout at headquarters. If he decided the time had come to
revive cross-border intelligence operations, there was every chance it would
happen.
Still, it was an agonizingly slow process. By the time my period of military
service was drawing to an end, it hadn’t happened. I did not seriously think of
leaving. Though my two years in Sayeret Matkal had been the most physically
demanding of my life, they were also the most fulfilling. I did not want to
forfeit the chance of being part of its finally becoming an operational unit. So I
committed to at least a few more years in the military. I joined my closest friend
among the recruits, Uri Zakay, for six months in officers’ school as we waited,
or hoped, for approval to actually use the skills and qualities we had acquired in
the sayeret.
And in the summer of 1962, shortly after I returned to the unit from officers’
school as a second-lieutenant, the green light finally came.
63
Chapter Four
At first, it was only “approval in principle”. It’s impossible to overstate the
trepidation with which Israel’s military brass, and Ben-Gurion himself,
approached the decision finally to send Sayeret Matkal into action. It was not
just the fact that we were a unit uttterly untested in the field. The stakes in the
mission we were contemplating were enormous. For the first time since Uri
Ilan’s deseperate act of suicide in a Damascus jail cell, Israeli soldiers would be
crossing into Arab territory on an intelligence mission. Amid continuing
tensions with the increasingly militant rulers of Egypt and Syria, there seemed
little doubt that at some stage we would again have to fight to defend our
security, perhaps even our existence as a state. The Rotem debacle had
highlighted the danger of a surprise attack, potentially leaving us in a scramble
to call up reserve units as Syrian or Egyptian tanks advanced on our borders.
But the memory of Uri Ilan remained a haunting reminder of the risks of failure.
My role, again, came down partly to accident. The man initially chosen to
lead the operation was someone I’d liked from my first days in the sayeret.
Ya’akov Tal, known as Tubul, was a year older than me. He came from Tiberias
in the north of Israel. As a teenager, he’d worked for extra pocket money
alongside shepherds in the hills above the Sea of Galilee, picking up a nearfluent
command of Arabic. He was self-confident without a trace of arrogance,
with a natural talent for connecting with his soldiers. In my case, there was a
further bond: a shared fascination with math and sciences.
But Tubul had applied to the leading technology institute in Israel, the
Technion near Haifa. As he began training his four-man team to cross onto
Syria’s Golan Heights, he received word that he’d been accepted. The academic
year wouldn’t begin until September, and it had been assumed at first that the
operation would happen before then. But even though Meir Amit was pressing
the rest of the military brass for a final go-ahead, it still hadn’t arrived by early
August. Avraham decided he needed a fall-back plan. He called Tubul and me
into his office. He said he wanted me to join the team’s training as Tubul’s
deputy, and to be ready to step in as commander if that proved necessary. When
we next heard from Amit, a week later, it became clear the mission would not
happen in time for Tubul to lead it.
We would be setting out from the northeast corner of Israel, a patch of
parkland near a kibbutz called Dan, only a mile or so from where Uri Ilan’s
group had begun its mission. This time, however, the target was more
64
ambitious. We intended to bug the communications line running east from
Banias, the Syrians’ base in the north of the Golan, toward Quneitra, their main
headquarters. That meant taking a longer route, beginning with a climb onto a
plateau about 200 feet high and crossing the Banias River toward the Syrian
base.
We had nearly three weeks for our final preparations. After two years of
sayeret training, I was confident that, physically, we would be up to the task.
But even without the obvious jitters emanating from the kirya, I could not help
but be aware of the possibility, and the cost, of failure. Every evening, I would
stake out time to go through everything that might conceivably go wrong. Years
later, when I went to do my graduate studies at Stanford, I was exposed to
words of wisdom from a non-kibbutznik – Benjamin Franklin – which probably
best summed up what drove my planning for the sayeret’s first operation, and
the others that would follow. “Failing to prepare,” he wrote, “is to preparing for
failure.”
Running into Syrian soldiers was, of course, top of the list of potential
pitfalls. But land mines were also a danger. I got a map of the area from military
intelligence which, in theory at least, showed the location of mines all along the
edge of the Golan. But it had been compiled over a period of nearly two decades
on the basis of information from shepherds, smugglers and the occasional Arab
agent. Whenever they reported seeing the telltale combination of fencing and
yellow danger triangles, the place was marked. Once it was marked, no one in
intelligence headquarters dared erase it. The result was that the map now
showed an almost unbroken stretch of mines. And within the amount of time
that we had to get ready, there was no way of knowing which of the minefields
was still there.
The timing was chosen by the cycle of the moon. We wanted to cross into
Syria in as near to total darkness as possible. That meant the final days of
September. Unlike Tubul, who had been commanding the team from the
moment they had joined the sayeret, I’d been working with them for only a
couple of months. My deputy for the operation, Avi Telem, was also a
newcomer. But he was smart, steady and he had served in the Golani Brigade,
so he knew the terrain along the border.
Avraham could not hide his own nervousness as the operation drew nearer.
A week before we were due to set off, he asked whether we were planning a
further, full-scale exercise. When I said the final run-through was set for the
following night, in the Negev, he told me he wanted Meir Har-Zion to attend.
65
During the exercise, Meir said nothing at all. I couldn’t help wondering
whether, despite our nearly daily exercises, and my nightly stock-taking, I’d
somehow missed an obvious detail in our planning. When we got back to the
sayeret base, Avraham was waiting for us. “Well?” he asked Meir. “They don’t
need me,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.” It was not just a source of
reassurance for me, but a huge relief for Avraham.
The team I’d inherited from Tubul included three gifted soldiers with
different backgrounds, and different skills. Motti Nagar was born in Cairo. He
was short but solidly built, smart, level-headed and almost always smiling. Kuti
Sharabi grew up in a Yemeni family in an impoverished neighborhood in Tel
Aviv. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, a quick mind and sometimes
even quicker tongue, but an extraordinary ability to focus on the task at hand.
The third member was a kibbutznik. His name was Moshe Elimelech. We called
him Moshiko. Utterly self-contained, a man who spoke only when absolutely
necessary, he also brought two different qualities to the mission. One was going
to be indispensable: an almost squirrel-like ability to climb trees. Or telephone
poles. The other, of which I was a bit more leery, was a total, deeply irrational,
absence of fear.
Though none of us needed a further reminder of the weight being attached to
our mission, the night before we headed north, Avraham got a call from the
chief-of- staff’s office. Tzvi Tzur wanted to see me the next morning for a
personal briefing. I tried to get Avraham to say no. I pointed out that if we
didn’t get going by ten o’clock at the latest, we’d risk throwing everything off
schedule. But “no” was not an option. After some further back-and-forth, it was
agreed that I would meet the commander of Israel’s armed forces at nine the
next morning at a gas station north of Tel Aviv and join him for the 20-minute
drive along the coastal road to a speaking engagement he had in Netanya.
I saw Avraham again before I set off. “We are beginning an extremely
critical 24 hours for our unit, the intelligence corps, in fact for the armed forces
as a whole,” he told me. “I don’t know what might happen. No one does. Just
remember two things. First, out there, in the field, you are the ramatkal” – the
chief of staff. He told me that only I and my team could judge and respond to
what we encountered once the operation started. “And second, this mission has
to be accomplished.”
I left see the real ramatkal. Before we began the drive to Netanya, he asked
me to unfold the map I’d brought with me and talk him through, step by step,
how we planned to get onto the Golan, plant the bugging device, and get back
66
again. The more I talked, however, the more I sensed that the details weren’t
what General Tzur really wanted to know. I think what he actually wanted to
gauge was whether I felt confident. He wanted to reassure himself he wasn’t
taking any more than the obvious risks in sending us, in Uri Ilan’s footsteps,
back into Syria. Fortunately, he didn’t ask whether I was sure we’d succeed. If
he had, I would have said, yes, we were prepared. But there was no way we
could be certain. Still, he must have got what he wanted. When we reached the
edge of Netanya, he shook my hand, wished me luck and went on his way.
The rest of the team was waiting at the crossroads for me to join them. Two
teams, in fact: mine, with whom I’d be crossing into Syria in less than 10 hours’
time, and our hillutz, or back-up. A hillutz was always a part of sayeret
operations. The back-up group would stay on the Israeli side of the border. If we
got into trouble, they’d come in after us.
Even after my briefing for the chief of staff, we had one last stop to make on
the way north. It was at the headquarters of the army’s northern command. It
was in a Tegart fortress, one of dozens built by the British around the country,
with watchtowers on each corner of the outer walls. The northern commander
was an equally forbidding figure. Avraham Yoffe had served in the British
artillery in the Second World War and the Golani Brigade in 1948. He used to
joke with other officers that while they looked like a bunch of kids, he was the
only one with the true bearing of a general.
He must have been busy when we arrived, because we ended up hanging
around in the courtyard for nearly 20 minutes. Just as I was beginning to worry
that the timetable for what really mattered – our climb up onto the Golan – was
being put at risk, I noticed that off to the side was a beautifully polished jeep. I
assumed it belonged to General Yoffe, who was known to be an avid hunter and
would later become the head of Israel’s National Parks Authority. It had a
padlocked metal grill on the back which held two jerrycans of gasoline. Yori
Cohen, the commander of the back-up team, and I spotted the fuel containers at
the same time. We couldn’t help smiling. Yes, we were about to embark on an
operation which, assuming we didn’t fail, would finally give Israel real-time
intelligence from across our border for the first time since the 1950s. But we
were still Sayeret Matkal, still chronically short of gasoline for our field
exercises. And I still hadn’t forgotten how to pick a lock. As Yori stood guard, I
broke into the grill and removed the jerrycans, one for each of us, and closed it
again. Then, after briefing the general, we headed to our setting-off point. Yoffe
himself left to join Avraham Arnan and Meir Amit’s intelligence deputy,
67
Ahraleh Yariv, in the command post for our mission, atop a hill on the Israeli
side of the northern border.
The sun set at around seven, but we waited for darkness. It was nearly eight
when we set out. Twenty minutes later, we crossed the border. I led the way,
with Motti Nagar, Moshiko, Kuti Sharabi and, finally, Avi Telem behind. We
carried the bugging equipment and our tools in our backpacks. Avi and I had a
pair of binoculars. Mine were bulkier, but offered a slightly better view in the
darkness. Each of us had an Uzi and a pair of grenades. All our planning had
been aimed at getting on to the Golan, installing the bug and getting out again. If
all went well, no one would even know we’d been there. But we had practiced
what to do if things went wrong. If challenged or ambushed by a Syrian patrol,
we would operate by old Company A rules. We would open fire.
The climb onto the plateau wasn’t too tough, not nearly as hard as our
sayeret training treks. When we reached the top, there was no obvious sign of
any Syrians. Still, we had to move slowly. Even with my binoculars, I could see
barely 30 yards into the moonless night, and I had to scan the route ahead, back
and forth, to make sure there were none of the fences or warning signs to keep
the Syrians’ own soldiers, or unsuspecting shepherds, from a minefield. Soon,
however, we found an obviously well-used footpath which I figured was very
likely to be safe.
When we had walked a few minutes, we found ourselves going through a
tangle of bushes and reeds, some of them up to two feet high, still dry and
crackly from the summer. Aside from the risk of tripping, I knew the noise we
were making might attract attention. I told the rest of the team to hang back 20
yards behind me. I moved forward to make sure the route was clear before
signaling them to follow. I had been slightly nervous on the climb up, not so
much because I expected trouble but because there was no way of knowing
what to expect. Much as I tried to put the concerns of the generals from my
mind, I also knew that this was no ordinary mission. But almost immediately,
the nerves had gone, and I was now focused only on getting us through the next
minute, the next 20 or 30 yards of the Golan.
But as soon as we’d made it across the plateau, we ran into trouble. We
needed to cross the Banias River. On our map, I’d picked out what looked to be
a shallow ford. But the water was much higher than we expected. After
spending 30 minutes scouting the bank for 150 yards in either direction, we
settled on what seemed to be the shallowest part. Yet we hadn’t anticipated the
need to cross a river in full flow. Worse, we’d never trained to do it. Not had we
68
brought any special equipment. Unless we could figure out a way to cross – and
quickly – we would be putting the timetable for the whole operation at risk.
The only remotely useful tool I could find was two 25-foot lengths of
parachute wire. We spliced them together. I took the lead end and waded in. I
sunk up to above my chest, but managed to get across. With Avi Telem on the
other bank holding his end of the wire, the others used it to help them cross, so
they stayed a bit drier. They also kept the intercept equipment dry. Finally, Avi
followed. But both he and I were now soaking wet. We were also behind
schedule. We had covered less than half of the three-mile route to the telephone
pole. Even if we did manage to install the bugging device, the delay meant we
might be spotted on our way back to Israel. We were under strict orders to turn
back by 1:15 in the morning even if that meant not getting the intercept in place.
And it was already past midnight.
We began climbing into the heart of the Heights, planning to go around the
southern edge of the Syrian base at Banias. The vegetation was sparser but we
still ran the risk of making noise from the stones and larger shards of rock as we
weaved our way up. Within 10 minutes, I could see the vague outline of the
army camp: several large buildings for several hundred Syrian troops, ringed by
trenches with security outposts and a barbed-wire fence on the perimeter.
For a half-hour or so, we moved forward in a kind of rubber-band formation.
I would advance as quietly as I could, listen for signs of Syrian troops, scan the
area ahead with my binoculars and wave the others to follow. But as I prepared
to move forward again, I suddenly felt a tug on my shoulder. It was Moshiko,
and the very fact of his speaking was proof of his alarm. “Ehud,”we’ve got to
go faster,” he said. “We won’t get there in time.” I said I understood. But I told
him to wait for the others to catch up and stay behind with them as I scouted the
way ahead. Still, by the time the outer fence of the base came into view, the
others had picked up their pace. They were only 15 feet behind me.
It was then I heard the sound of movement. I motioned the others down. At
first, I thought it was a wild animal. But then I noticed, 20 feet in front of us and
a bit off to our right on a slight rise, a group of three Syrian soldiers. They were
lying on rocky scrubland 40 yards outside the fence. One was tossing and
turning. Another was snoring. I maneuvered my Uzi into firing position just in
case. We waited for a minute. Then two. But it seemed clear they really were
sleeping.
69
Then, from directly behind me, came another sound: the hiss of Avi’s bulky
two-way radio. I was worried we’d end up waking the Syrians. But just as I was
figuring out how to make sure we got past them before that happened, Avi drew
up beside me.
“Ehud,” he whispered. “It’s 1:15. The command post ordered us to turn
back.”
“Turn off the radio,” I said, my hand on his elbow, reassuringly I hoped, as I
led him and the others back a full 100 feet from the Syrians. We took a wider
route around the camp. We moved much more quickly on the final mile to the
road that led toward Quneitra. We were now well clear of the camp, and I felt it
was unlikely we’d run into a patrol. I was also confident we’d have an easier
return trip. I knew what had held us up on the way in: finding a path on the
plateau clear of mines, figuring out how to cross the river, and the general
unfamiliarity of the terrain. None of those applied now. I felt we could get the
bugging job done and still be back before dawn. As we got nearer the road, Avi
asked me a couple of more times whether he should turn the radio back on.
“No,” I kept telling him. “It’s OK. I’ll tell you when.”
It was about two in the morning when we reached the road. We found a
telephone pole set back on the edge of a field. Moshiko hoisted himself onto
Kuti Sharabi’s shoulders, clambered up the pole and installed the bugging
device. The entire operation took him less than 10 minutes. We moved more
quickly on the way back. By around 3:30, we had crossed the river. “You can
turn on the radio now,” I told Avi, who was obviously relieved. He handed it to
me. Using our agreed code words, I reported our location, and added the phrase
for “mission accomplished.”
When we began our final descent, it was starting to get light. I assumed we
were near enough to the border to make it unlikely we’d be shot at. Still, there
was a danger we’d be spotted by a patrol, so I was relieved when we reached the
mound of boulders, more than ten feet high, that served as a tank barrier outside
Kibbutz Dan. When we stepped behind it, I saw that not only Avraham, but
Meir Amit as well, were waiting. The Head of Military Intelligence said
nothing. He didn’t have to. He just shook my hand, beaming. Avraham grabbed
each of us, one by one, in a bear hug.
Then, drawing me aside, Avraham said that I had only narrowly missed
landing in deep trouble. I assumed my transgression was shutting off the radio
and disobeying the order to return. That was just part of the problem, however.
70
Despite General Yoffe’s angry protests in the command post, Avraham had told
him what he’d told me back at the base: that once an operation like this was
underway, only the commander on the spot could make life-or-death decisions.
I was “the ramatkal in the field.” But Yoffe had also discovered that his
jerrycans of gasoline were missing. He insisted that if and when I returned
safely from the Golan, I be handed over to the military police.
I don’t know what I would have told the general if he’d asked me directly
whether I broke into his jeep. But in the mix of celebration and relief that the
Syrian operation had succeeded, I got away with what amounted to a pleabargain.
I promised both Meir Amit and Avraham – at least one of whom
believed me – that it would not happen again.
71
Chapter Five
Almost no one in Israel knew what we had done. But the next morning, a
package arrived at the Sayeret Matkal base from one of the few people who did.
We opened it in Avraham’s office. It was a nearly full carton of champagne:
real, French champagne, since it would be years before Israel’s embryonic wine
industry produced anything similar. Inside was a note from the chief of staff.
“For the success of the operation,” General Tzur had written. “Minus two
bottles… to teach Ehud Brog not to shut off his field radio.”
I assumed that his reprimand was tongue-in-cheek, for the same reason I’d
escaped being locked up on General Yoffe’s orders as a gasoline thief. Had we
been captured on the Golan, the very future of the sayeret as an operational
intelligence unit would have been put at risk. Tzur, and Ben-Gurion as well,
would have faced a reopening of all the old wounds from the Uri Ilan mission.
But not only had we managed to get in and out of Syria in one piece. We had
taken at least a first step toward erasing the blind spot in our intelligence
capabilities shown up so dramatically by Rotem. A few days later, I received a
letter from the chief of staff informing me that I was to receive my first tzalash,
or operational decoration, in recognition of “a mission which contributed to the
security of the state of Israel.”
My own feelings were more mixed. I was proud of what I, and my team, had
accomplished. On a personal level, too, I felt I’d reached an important landmark
on my unlikely journey from the winter morning when I’d arrived as physically
frail, awkward kibbutz teenager at APC boot camp in the Negev; through my
years of sayeret training under the strict, sometimes sardonic, but always
supportive gaze of Israel’s most storied commandos; to, now, having begun to
make a real contribution to Avraham’s vision of a new kind of Israeli military
unit. But while Avraham, General Tzur and our other military and intelligence
chiefs celebrated our mission, I felt not so much triumph as relief. I didn’t kid
myself: I knew that the operation could just as easily have gone wrong. In fact,
it very nearly did, through errors or omissions I had made. I made that point, in
general terms, when we joined Avraham and the rest of the sayeret in a formal
debriefing. But that very night, just as I had in the days before we set off, I
wrote down in detail some of the oversights I knew I’d have to correct if we
were to succeed in further missions.
Why hadn’t I chosen a route that took us further away from the Syrian base
at Banias? How had I let us arrive so unprepared, untrained and unequipped for
72
crossing the swollen river? Why hadn’t I taken the time to check the current
several miles downriver inside Israel? And couldn’t we have moved more
quickly on the way in, even with the delay in crossing the river?
I was aware of, and grateful for, the confidence Avraham had shown in me.
He had taken a chance in choosing me to lead the sayeret’s first, critical
operation. He must surely have had doubts about whether I could handle the
task. Years later, I asked him about it. He told me that he’d been relying on
intuition. Yes, he realized I’d had no experience of a real cross-border mission.
But that was true of everyone else in the unit as well. He was convinced that the
tools needed for success were self-confidence, attention to detail and an ability to
think and act in response to what happened on the ground – all qualities which
he was confident that I possessed.
Now that we had provided Israel access to communications in the north of
the Golan, there was a demand for us to do the same in other parts of the
Heights. I was involved in nearly all of the missions we were asked to undertake
in the months that followed, either as commander of the main force or the
hillutz. I was also soon training a new team of recruits for future operations. But
perhaps the most important sign of Avraham’s confidence was to involve me in
early efforts to broaden Sayeret Matkal’s experience and reach beyond pure
intelligence missions – to create a true special forces unit that could fight as
well.
Early in 1963, we hosted a visit to the unit by Colonel Albert Merglen, a
veteran of France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, and commander of
the airborne commando force known as the 11 th Demi-brigade Parchutistes de
Choc. As the colonel looked on, I led a sayeret team on a live-fire raid in a
training area not far from Lod Airport. We attacked a position protected by
trenches and concrete barriers and stormed a two-story building. Eager to
impress Mergelen, Avraham even insisted on our wearing French-style berets in
place of helmets. I assume it was the attack more than the berets that did the
trick. But a couple of months later, Merglen proposed a series of exchanges. The
first would involve an officer from Sayeret Matkal officer spending eight weeks
on a counter-guerrilla commanders’ course in the parachutistes’ training
headquarters.
Avraham picked me to go. The French base was in a 17th-century fortress
near Mont Louis, in the Pyrenees along the Spanish border. I’d never been
outside Israel, at least legally. I had no passport. I didn’t own a suit or a tie. But
within days, I was kitted and fitted. I boarded an El Al flight to Paris and, on a
73
storm-tossed Caravelle, flew to Perpignan in southeastern France. There were
eighteen “shock parachutists” on the course. I had just turned twenty-one. Not
only were most of them at least a decade older. They were the epitome of
toughness. The guy who taught us how to set booby-traps had parachuted
behind German lines in the Second World War. All of the men had fought in
Indochina and Algeria. One had operated behind Vietminh lines, surviving for a
year-and-a-half on nuts, berries, tree bark and snakes. With the benefit of my
sayeret training, I was at least their equal in fitness. I had also not spent years
consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol and smoking Gitanes. But I’d never
experienced anything nearly as demanding as some of the training we were put
through.
With backpacks crammed with Alpine military gear and lead weights as
well, we hiked on to the peaks overlooking the fortress. They were covered with
snow and ice from about 6,500 feet upward. We trudged for hours, shifting to
snowshoes with cleats for the ice. We were taught how to dig caves in the snow
and to use ice axes to keep from tumbling down the steeper inclines. We scaled
cliff faces, without safety cables or nets. Our training inside the fortress always
included a break for lunch. Since the parachutistes de choc were, after all,
French, it was a Paris-restaurant-standard meal with copious quantities of wine.
I didn’t drink at the time, but could hardly abstain altogether. The first exercise
after lunch was pistol marksmanship. The instructors kept well clear when it
was my turn.
Yet however impressed, even at times awestruck, I was by the toughness of
the French commandos, and the obvious closeness they had built during
combat, I began to sense a darker side in them as well. They didn’t talk much.
Even if they had, my few words of French would not have been much help in
deciphering what made them tick. But every few nights, I would accompany
them when they walked into the small village down the road for a movie, or a
few drinks, and the locals would literally cross the street to avoid us. Later, I
discovered that every one of my French comrades had been involved in the
OAS, the far-right anti-De Gaulle opposition in the French army in the late
1950s. In Algeria, they had mounted free-lance attacks on the insurgents, and on
civilians as well. Though Algeria had been granted independence the year
before, these men were unreconciled to it. In fact, a few months after my time in
Mont Louis, the Demi-brigade was dismantled, when several of its top officers
were found to be involved in an assassination plot against President De Gaulle.
74
After my return in June 1963, Avraham asked me to share my experiences
with the other sayeret officers. I began with the positives. I singled out the sense
of self-confidence, allied with individual strength and teamwork, that the French
commandos had developed from exposure to almost incredible extremes of
danger. I believed that their success depended not on eliminating risk. We all
knew that was impossible. It was about professionalism developed over a period
of years by men who had served together in the toughest of circumstances. But I
also mentioned their darker side, which seemed to me a reminder of the danger
of the misapplication of the very qualities which made them a formidable
military force. “The ethos of a unit like theirs, and like ours, is essential to
making us strong,” I said. “But what I saw in France was an entire ecosystem
that these guys had created, extremely patriotic in their own minds, reinforced
by one another. But dangerous for society as a whole.”
* * *
It would be nearly a decade before Sayeret Matkal became not just a military
intelligence unit, but a fighting force, and I would turn out to have a central role
in making that happen. But there was an almost equally daunting challenge we
were called on to tackle first – a critical one, if Israel was going to be truly
prepared in the case of a further war. For while our bugging missions on the
Golan had reduced our vulnerability to a surprise attack in the north, the real
challenge of Rotem had yet to be addressed. It was Egypt – with its hundreds of
battle tanks, and hundreds of thousands of men under arms – that was by far our
most powerful Arab enemy. President Nasser wasted no opportunity to flaunt
his determination to fight, defeat and ultimately erase the state of Israel. But we
still had no reliable, real-time intelligence on his forces.
Fixing that, if such an operation was even possible, would make our bugging
operations on the Golan look like mere boy-scout missions. We could not
simply walk into Egypt with our backpacks, find a telephone pole on one of the
few roads crossing the vast expanse of desert, and attach a bugging device. The
idea was to tap into the main military communications cable in the Sinai. That
meant using a vastly more powerful, and far bulkier, intercept apparatus,
weighing more than half a ton. Even getting it into Egypt would be a problem.
We certainly couldn’t carry it our backpacks, or tow it across the sand. Even if
we figured a way to get it there, we would still have to dig up the Egyptian
75
cable, install the machinery, cover our tracks and get back into Israel again
undetected. Even if we managed to avoid getting captured, without completely
camouflaging what we’d done, the Egyptians would discover what we had
done, almost certainly tipping off Syria as well to our bugging operations on the
Golan Heights.
The difficulties with a Sinai operation weren’t just theoretical. Almost a year
before leading the first mission on the Golan, I’d actually been involved in
preliminary planning, and fairly detailed training, for such a mission in the
Sinai. We’d ended up abandoning the idea as obviously unworkable.
But Meir Amit, not just our unit’s overall commander in the kirya but Chief
of Operations during Rotem, recognized that getting intelligence access to
Egypt was central to Israeli security. He was intent on reviving the plan to tap
into Nasser’s communications in the Sinai. So was Avraham Arnan. He enlisted
the backing of an old friend, Uri Yarom, who was now commander of the Israeli
Air Force and was eager to put our fleet of recently acquired Sikorsky S-58
helicopters to operational use. When Avraham called me in to tell me what he
had in mind, he began by saying it would be “by far the greatest challenge
we’ve contemplated” – typically disarming candor, but also a challenge which
I’m pretty sure he knew would only increase my determination to at least try.
The flight in would be difficult enough. Israel had never before tried such a
heliborne mission. But he told me that wasn’t my problem. “That will be Uri’s
job.” The really testing part would be to carry out an mission, at night, deep
inside Egypt, cover our tracks and get out again in one piece. “Still, I’m sure
that we can succeed,” he said. “And I want you and your team to do it.”
Even now, more than half-a-century later, some of the details of how we
planned to tap into the Egyptians’ communications remain classified. But once
I’d chosen my team of sayeret soldiers for the mission, we trained for nearly
nine months. We drafted in geologists to identify areas of the Negev similar to
the terrain we’d find in the Sinai. We developed a series of methods to prevent
Egyptian soldiers or scouts from discovering that we’d been there – assuming,
of course, we managed to get in, attach the intercept, and return safely. It was a
relentless process of trial… and error.
One of the many reasons we’d abandoned the plan a couple of years earlier
was that, in a nighttime exercise to see whether we could avoid detection by
Israel’s own crack desert scouts, we’d failed utterly. Now, after many weeks of
training in the Negev, we did, finally, succeed – in a test running for four
76
straight nights which replicated, as nearly as we could, what we intended to do
across the border in the Sinai. It was as if we’d never been there at all.
Yet there were the errors, setbacks and frustrations as well. Many months
into our planning, we conducted a series of run-throughs in which we simulated
attaching the intercept to Israel’s telephone network in the south, not far from
the camp where I’d done my tironut. Though it all seemed to go as planned, the
next morning in rained heavily. Within hours, the phone company was getting
reports from all around southern Israel of phones malfunctioning. Even
allowing for the fact it rained less in the Sinai, we had to address the risk. I went
to see the people in Meir Amit’s technology unit, and they began developing a
waterproofing system for the equipment.
The main problem with the equipment, however, was its sheer weight. The
helicopter could get us, and it, into Egypt. But we couldn’t fly directly to the
cable site in the Sinai. We might just as well tell the Egyptians we were on our
way. At around 1,100 pounds, it was much too heavy for us to carry. And if we
were going to go ahead with the mission, time was running short. A date for the
operation had been set by the kirya: February 1964. I was not alone in believing
that, unless we cracked the problem of getting the equipment to the cable site,
the operation was impossible.
The solution came from a staff officer in military intelligence. Meir Amit
visited our base once a month to hear how the preparations were going. With the
date getting closer, he brought along his entire staff. When I raised my concern
about the weight problem, a colonel from his personnel section said: “Why not
build a lightweight rickshaw, small enough to get in the door of the helicopter,
but which can carry all or most of the equipment once you’re on the ground?”
Within days, they had a prototype, made of airline-standard tubing and designed
to be pulled by two men. We held an exercise in the Negev. But it was almost
impossible for two men to pull through the sand. It also left deep zig-zag
imprints in the sand, which would surely raise the suspicions of the Egyptians.
But prototype number-two was a four-wheel, chrome alloy cart. The
technology experts had made the axles telescopic, so the vehicle would get
through the door of the chopper but could be expanded to the width of an
Egyptian army Jeep. They had borrowed nose wheels from a training jet. To
complete their oeuvre, they glued on real tire tread from one of the Egyptian
Jeeps we had captured in the 1956 war.
77
We were as ready as we were ever going to be. We got the final go-ahead
from in mid-February. Our backpacks were crammed full with the whole array
of equipment we’d designed, commandeered or purchased for the mission –
including a metal detector we got from a hobby shop in Pennsylvania. All the
cargo except our personal gear, our weapons and our communications
equipment was loaded onto the cart. A command post was set up in a few
wooden huts on Mount Keren in the Negev, complete with special antennas to
receive the intercept transmissions if we succeeded. Not since the first Golan
operation had the attention of the kirya been so keen, or the stakes so high. In
addition to Meir Amit, and of course Avraham, also flying down to Mount
Keren would be General Tzur’s successor as armed forces chief of staff – a
gruff Palmach veteran whom I’d met very briefly at the end of my officer’s
course but who I would come to know well, and work closely with, in the years
ahead: Yitzhak Rabin.
* * *
The helicopter lifted off at about six-thirty at night. Compared to special
operations nowadays, the mission still had a somewhat improvised feel about it.
Certainly, that was true of the equipment we were ferrying in, and the tools
we’d devised to make sure we could get it installed and working. But the men in
my team were soldiers I’d trained from the day they arrived in the sayeret.
Achihud Madar was unfailingly surefooted, whether finding his way alone at
night on unfamiliar ground or in a firefight inside a building. He also had
natural dexterity. He and another of the soldiers who was also gifted with his
hands, Nissim Jou’ari, would be performing the most technically delicate part of
the operation on the cable. The third member was Oded Rabinovitch. Tall, thin
and quiet, he was absolutely reliable in whatever part of an operation he was
given to execute. And as my deputy commander, I’d chosen a sayeret officer
named Kobi Meron, who’d been with me on a number of Golan missions. Over
six feet tall, he was probably the strongest man in the unit, quick-thinking and
utterly unflappable.
When we landed, we telescoped out the axles on the cart. The roar of the
departing chopper was replaced by silence. Under the soft light of hundreds of
stars, I led the way deeper into the desert. It took nearly an hour to reach the
road leading to the cable site. Though traffic was light, I posted Oded and
78
Nissim as lookouts. Kobi and I began digging a trench. The top layer of sand
was easy to remove. But then, just a few inches down, our shovels struck
something hard. Maybe it was a sheet of rock. Maybe sand packed tight over the
millennia. But it resisted all our attempts to break through.
We had to find a way to get far enough beneath the surface to install the
equipment. I called back Oded and Nissim from lookout duty. All four of us
attacked the subsoil with every tool in our backpacks that could conceivably
help. It took nearly three hours in all. But we finally managed to carve out a
trench that seemed as if it might just do the job. It wasn’t as deep or as wide as
we’d planned. But we were approaching a point where we would have to give
up. We couldn’t risk any more time digging, and still leave time to attach the
intercept unit, cover our tracks and make the rendezvous with the helicopter to
take us back into Israel.
Achihud and Nissim cramped themselves into the hole and got to work, like
surgeons in an operating theater, silent except for the faint hum of the intercept
equipment. Within a little less than an hour, they’d finished the main part of the
work. During our training exercises, we’d factored in a fall-back plan, a way of
ensuring we got the unit installed but without additional equipment to extend its
battery life. Since we were still behind schedule, I was tempted to stop while we
were ahead. But having come this far, and knowing the potential risks of a
further mission to refresh the power unit and replace the batteries, I told them to
keep going, and also to take the extra few minutes needed to make sure the
equipment was functioning.
We had to be out of Egypt by first light, and we were now left with more
than an hour’s less time than we had reckoned on to make it back to the
rendezvous point. There was another problem, too, which I at first sensed more
than saw. A bank of fog was closing in. It had come in patches at first, but was
getting denser. We had the same radio we had taken on to the Golan. We’d
worked out codewords for each part of the operation but otherwise agreed to
break silence only if absolutely necessary. Now, I had no choice. If the fog
continued to thicken, it would block any chance of the helicopter getting in. I
radioed the command post and said as calmly as I could: “The milk is coming.”
It wasn’t elegant. But “milk” was our codeword for fog. The chopper would
now try to bring us out within 30 minutes.
Moving more quickly now that the cart was nearly empty, we made our way
eastward. As conditions worsened, I radioed again with a short series of
numbers: directions for a new pickup point. Even that seemed like it might not
79
work. The fog now enveloped us completely. I brought the team to a stop. I
stayed with the cart while the other four outlined a landing area with kerosene
flares in the hope that the pilot would see us. It was another five minutes when
we heard the thump of chopper blades. Though we couldn’t see more than a few
feet, I suddenly saw the outline of the landing gear and then the underbelly. But
the helicopter did not seem in control. It was drifting towards where I was
standing with the cart. It was just seconds away from hitting me when its nose
wrenched upward. It landed with a judder a dozen yards away. Later, I learned
the navigator had realized the craft was drifting and, just before impact, shouted
a warning to the pilot.
We piled in, secured the cart and took off. Within a minute, the murky
blanket of fog was below us. As we swooped back into Israel, I could see the
first pink of sunrise. By the time we touched down at Tel Nof air force base,
southeast of Tel Aviv, the command post in the Negev was receiving the first
intercepts.
A few days later, one of the sayeret soldiers gave me a first-hand insight into
the mood in the command post in the final stages of the operation. Avsha
Horan’s role had been to act as security guard for the top brass in Mount Keren.
He occasionally took a peek inside. He described to me the atmosphere when I
radioed my “milk is coming” message: solemn faces, hushed conversations
between Avraham and Meir Amit. And off to the side, the recently elevated
chief-of-staff, Rabin, chain-smoking and biting his nails. Finally, the audible
sighs of relief when the pilot radioed in with his final message from the
chopper: “Out of the fog. Heading home.”
* * *
With the rest of the team, I was invited to see Yitzhak Rabin ten days later.
We were being given a further tzalash. This was the first time I’d met him since
leaving officers’ school two years earlier, when, with a few terse words, the
then-deputy chief of staff congratulated me and several other cadets who
graduated with top honors. I had felt a bit overwhelmed in his presence. Now, I
was struck by how shy he seemed. He greeted each of us with a tentative
handshake, and seemed uncomfortable in making eye contact. Yet once he
began asking me about the Sinai operation itself, it was as if he was
transformed. He was hungry for every detail, anxious to know the way we’d had
80
to adapt on the ground. And obviously pleased that we’d found a way to make
the operation work.
The Sinai mission marked a transition not just for me, but for others in
Sayeret Matkal as well. Avraham Aranan finally left the unit he’d imagined,