created and built. He became the head of the technology unit in military
intelligence. His deputy, Dovik Tamari, succeeded him, serving the first in what
would become two-year stints for each of his successors as the sayeret’s
commander. I, too, was given a wider role. Though I was still just a young
lieutenant, and too junior for the job, Dovik made me his de facto deputy, with
responsibility for operational oversight of our missions. I returned to the Sinai a
year later, not in that capacity but because of my on-the-ground experience, to
accompany a sayeret team which installed an intercept on a second Egyptian
communications cable.
Though the tzalash was gratifying, what gave me more satisfaction, and
pride, was the importance of the Sinai operations themselves. I was confident
that if we did have to go to war again, the equipment we installed, along with
the bugs on the Golan, would give us an essential edge. But in truth, I didn’t
actually believe there would be another war. Sure, the threat was still there.
Egypt, in particular, still seemed determined to find a way to hobble, and if
possible eliminate, Israel. But especially since the 1956 war, the fedayeen
attacks, and cross-border skirmishes, had been subsiding. Not long after the
second Sinai intercept mission, I was chatting with other officers on the sayeret
base and remember turning to one of them and saying I was sure that by the
time I was married and had a teenage child, we’d be able to take a skiing
holiday in Lebanon. We didn’t have peace yet. That might take time. But I felt
that things were getting more normal.
I began thinking what that would mean not just for Sayeret Matkal or Israel,
but for my own future. By the autumn of 1964, I’d reached a decision: to end
my active service in the unit that had been central to my life since leaving the
kibbutz. Dovik did persuade me to delay, for nearly a year. But at the end of the
summer of 1965, I left Sayeret Matkal. In fact, I left the army altogether. I went
to study mathematics and physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I would
remain involved in the sayeret as a reservist. But I couldn’t see devoting my
adult life to military service in a country which, fortunately, seemed on a
trajectory toward peace. I had spent five years in an extraordinary unit. It had
been more fascinating and fulfilling than I could have dreamed of when I’d
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finished my tironut. Now I looked forward to pursuing a different path with
equal eagerness and energy.
There was also something else which colored my thinking. For the first time
in my life, I had fallen in love.
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Chapter Six
The French have an expression for love at first sight: coup de foudre. A
thunderbolt. That was how it felt when I’d set eyes on nineteen-year-old Nili
Sonkin in mid-February 1963.
It was my first visit to the kirya in Tel Aviv. I’d been told to report to the
administrative section, to register my formal change of status from a mere
draftee to a staff officer, something I’d managed to overlook amid the demands
of our first sayeret operations on the Golan. Since I didn’t know which office to
go to, I asked a girl sitting at a desk near the entrance. She looked up with a
wide smile. When she directed me to the second floor, it wasn’t just her voice
that struck me: multi-timbered, almost like a musical composition. It was her
eyes. Bright, radiant, green. Full of playful, unapologetic self-confidence.
In the weeks that followed, I invented a series of excuses to return to the
kirya. I introduced myself to her, with as much composure as I could muster,
and on each further visit chatted to her a bit more. I told her about growing up in
Mishmar Hasharon, about math and music, about Israel, and how, as a soldier in
the past few years, I’d walked almost every inch of the land – in short, about
everything except our still-secret sayeret and our nighttime forays across the
border. She, too, opened up about her home and her family and her friends.
Though there was another girl I’d been going out with – the younger sister of
my old kibbutz co-conspirator, Moshe – she was more a friend than a girlfriend.
I’d never before felt anything like the connection I sensed with Nili, nor
anything like the race in my heartbeat as I set out to see her.
I also found myself gripped by an unexpected, and unfamiliar, lack of selfassurance.
I was now 22, three years older than Nili. I had the inbred confidence
of a kibbutznik, the quiet sense of specialness which, at least for another decade
or so, would give the children of the kibbutzim a disproportionate place in
Israel’s government and army, media and the arts. The same confidence which
had convinced me as a raw recruit back in boot camp that I could lead a supply
convoy to the edge of the Sinai. Since then, I’d begun to make a mark in Sayeret
Matkal as well, leading its first clandestine operation and receiving a citation
from the chief-of-staff. Yet with Nili, I couldn’t help feeling unmoored, totally
out of my depth. She was part of a different Israel. She was a Tel Avivit, born
and raised in the largest and brashest city in our young state, a place which was
everything the kibbutz was not. She had graduated from Alliance, a high school
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in north Tel Aviv set up with French backing and an accent on French language
and culture. Unlike the girls on the kibbutz – proud of their plain, utilitarian
clothes and sensible shoes – she wore make-up and perfume and, when she was
out of uniform, bright print dresses. She never tried to make me feel out of place. Still,
it was sometimes hard not to wonder whether she saw me as a country bumpkin – a
nice, interesting, bright county bumpkin, perhaps, but still an interloper or a curiosity in
her world.
It wasn’t until April, the day before I was due to leave for the French commando
fortress in Mont Louis, that I plucked up the courage to ask her out. I needn’t have
worried. She smiled. In fact, she proposed that since I was about to leave the country,
she should be the one doing the asking. She invited me to dinner that evening at
the apartment she shared with her parents and younger sister, about a half-mile
from the kirya, a few blocks back from the Mediterranean. Dinner was less
awkward than I feared, but I still felt nervous, until the dishes were cleared and
Nili and I went out to chat on the apartment balcony and, just before I left, to
share a first kiss.
We wrote each other almost every day while I was away in France. Once I
got back, we met whenever I wasn’t preparing for a sayeret operation. This was
the first girl I’d known whom I could talk to, and listen to, on almost any
subject with a feeling that it was natural and somehow meant to be. But in the
second half of 1963, I was working almost non-stop on preparing for a sayeret
operation. I still saw Nili when I could, sometimes at her apartment, but also
occasionally going out to a movie, a meal or a concert in Tel Aviv. Yet what I
most wanted was an acknowledgment that we were not just dating: a
commitment that we intended the relationship to last. I didn’t say this to Nili.
Years later, she would say this was down to pride. In fact, I was afraid she
would say no. And in the periods when we were apart, I couldn’t help asking
myself why she hadn’t raised the question of a deeper commitment.
Even more frustrating, by the time I entered Hebrew University in
September 1965, our relationship was again being conducted by mail. After her
military service, she took a two-year posting at our embassy in Paris. I could
understand the attraction, not just because of her taste for all things French. She
was working with the Mossad to help Moroccan Jews skirt an official
emigration ban and get to Israel. Still, it meant that charting our future together,
if we had one, was going to have to wait.
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* * *
The intellectual experience at university everything I hoped. The challenge
was finding a way to juggle my studies with my military reserve duty. In other
units, most reservists could schedule their one month per year when classes
weren’t in session. To be of use to Sayeret Matkal, I’d have to report when I
was most needed, and four weeks was unlikely to be enough. Near the end of
my first term, from late 1965 into the new year, I was called to participate in our
latest mission into the Sinai. The next winter, and through early 1967, I was
called up for another mission and was away for nearly two months.
That operation was prompted by the fact the Egyptians had begun laying a
new communications cable, parallel to the one where we’d put our intercepts.
With the diggers getting closer to where I’d led the first Sinai mission, the
kirya was worried that they might unearth the apparatus we’d installed. In
theory, at least, we’d planned for that. The bugging unit which we buried
included a booby-trap explosive device. Still, nearly four years on, we couldn’t
be absolutely sure it would work. So the decision was taken to send the sayeret
back on a further night crossing into the Sinai, defuse the explosives, and bring
the whole thing back to Israel. Since I was the one who’d installed it, I was
given the job of removing it.
The officer in overall command of the mission was Nechemia Cohen. He
was a good friend, and one of the finest officers in the unit. Before I left for
university, I’d mentored him so that he could take over my role as the effective
number-two officer in the sayeret, in charge of all our core operational
activities. He, too, was now about to leave, though not to for university. He was
becoming deputy commander of a paratroop company, under another former
Sayeret Matkal, named Yechiel Amsalem.
I was meant to defuse the booby-trap remotely: with a 12-foot-long metal
tool designed by the technology unit. I was fairly confident I’d manage. But
when Chief-of-Staff Rabin heard about the operation, he summoned me, along
with Eliezer Gonn, the scientist working with us on the plan to defuse the
booby-trap. Rabin was with a half-dozen other officers when we arrived. Gonn
had brought along a mock-up of the explosive device, which he proceeded to
place on Rabin’s office table. But as I took out the extension tool and started to
explain how I was going to defuse the device, Rabin turned to Gonn and asked:
“Could it blow up spontaneously?”
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“Yes, it could,” he said.
“What?” Rabin barked.
Gonn replied matter-of-factly: “It is a physical device. It obeys the laws of
physics. When, for instance, there’s a thunderstorm in Turkey, a flash of
lightning could discharge at precisely the frequency needed, or one of its lower
harmonies, with enough energy to activate the fuse in the detonator.”
I was far junior to everyone else in the room. But as a physics student, I was
probably the only one who could fully follow the argument he was making.
Looking at Rabin’s expression, it was clear that he was about to cancel the
operation on the spot. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Could I ask Doctor Gonn
another question?”
I pointed at an unopened bottle of orange soda on Rabin’s desk. “Tell me,” I
asked the physicist, “is it possible that the fluid in that bottle is spontaneously
leaking through the glass even as I’m speaking?”
“Sure,” Gonn said. “It might take years before even a fraction of a centimeter
of the soda goes missing. But glass is like a ‘frozen’ liquid, and liquid water, or
the molecules, are seeping into, and through, the more viscous ‘liquid’ of the
glass. It’s just physics.”
Rabin looked at me, then at Gonn. But he had clearly got the message. “The
operation is confirmed,” he said, in the deep, gravelly voice I would become
much more familiar with in the years ahead. “Good luck.”
The device didn’t explode, but I couldn’t defuse it either. I did manage to get
the remote metal tool locked on the bolt on the booby trap. But it wouldn’t
budge – even when I waved back Nechamia and the others and took out an
ordinary wrench. Though this was the first of my sayeret missions that ended in
failure, that wasn’t what worried me as we boarded our helicopter back into
Israel a couple of hours before dawn. It was the real possibility that the
Egyptians would inadvertently discover that we’d been intercepting their
communications. Dovik Tamari, as sayeret commander, was especially upset.
This was one of the last operations during his period in command of the unit. He
was about to hand over to a veteran paratroop officer, Uzi Yairi.
Yet our aborted Sinai mission turned out not to matter. What saved our
eavesdropping network was the very thing which I was confident would not
happen when I left for university: another Arab-Israeli war.
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* * *
Tension began building in the north in the spring of 1967, initially set off by
Syrian efforts to divert water from the upper reaches of the Jordan River, an
important water source for Israel was well. In a series of exchanges, Syrian
troops on the Golan fired on Israeli tractors in the demilitarized zone below, and
began shelling our argicultural settlements in the Galilee, while we responded
with tank fire and then air power, scrambling our jets and shooting down six
Syrian MiG-21s.
The first indication that we might be headed toward war came as I returned
to university for the spring term, and trouble began brewing in the south. Ben-
Gurion had by now retired as prime minister. His successor was the undeniably
thoughtful, if far less charismatic, Levi Eshkol. During Israel’s Independence
Day parade on May 15, he received word that Egypt had moved thousands of
troops into the Sinai, nearer to the border with Israel. Then, with the Soviets
warned Nasser of what they said were Israeli plans for a preemptive strike
against Syria, he went further expelling the United Nations force put in place
after the 1956 war. On May 23, he closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s trading
gateway to the Red Sea and the source of virtually all our oil imports.
I was told to report to Sayeret Matkal the following day, as part of the first
group of reservists called up. When I reached the base, Uzi Yairi, who was now
in charge of the unit, organized us into four teams. He put me in command of
one of them. We were told to prepare ourselves to helicopter into the Sinai,
attack a series of Egyptian air bases and put the runways out of commission. My
team’s target was the base at Gebel Libni, not far from where I’d placed, and
recently failed to defuse, our first intelligence intercept.
With each passing day, war looked more likely, and there was no confidence
we would win without a costly struggle. In 1948, Arab attacks had killed about
170 people in Tel Aviv. Now, word got out that a park in the center of the city
had been set aside to allow for the burial of as many as 5,000. With Israel’s
military commanders pressing Eshkol to take the initiative and launch a
preemptive strike, he delivered a radio address at the end of May, intended to
reassure the country the situation was under control. But due to last-minute,
handwritten changes to his typescript, he faltered while reading it. He sounded
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anything but under control. Within days, he bowed to political pressure and
brought back Moshe Dayan, now a member of the Knesset, as Defense Minister.
I still vividly remember a visitor to the sayeret the day after Eshkol’s
address. Colonel Eli Zeira was head of the “collection department” of the
intelligence corps, the rough equivalent of America’s National Security Agency.
Formally, Sayeret Matkal was part of his department. He called together all the
officers. He said that there had so far been three periods in the Zionist project.
The first was from the early settlements in Palestine at the end of the 19th
century until the establishment of Israel in 1948. The second, from 1948 until
the 1956 War. The third from 1956 until now. Then he said: “There will soon be
a war. Three Arab countries will take part. Within a week, we will defeat all of
them. And a new chapter in the history of Zionism will begin.”
The Six-Day War began on June 5, 1967. As Eli Zeira so confidently
predicted, not just Egypt and Syria, but Jordan, too, joined forces against us.
And it was indeed all over within a week. The final outcome – Israel’s victory –
was sealed by noon on the first day, with wave after wave of pre-emptive
bombing sorties destroying the entire air force of all three Arab countries. But
the fighting which followed was brutal in places: especially around Jerusalem,
but also in the south at the outset of the war, and later on the Golan Heights.
The first effect back in Israel of our air force attacks was to make our sayeret
helicopter missions into the Sinai suddenly superfluous. In fact, it left the entire
unit at loose ends – especially veterans or reservists like me who had been part
of our nearly decade-long development into Israel’s sole, dedicated cross-border
infiltration force. At this point, we were still just an intelligence unit, not an
elite commando force like Britain’s SAS, Avraham Aranan’s ultimate vision for
the sayeret. The aim of our bugging missions into Syria and Egypt was not to
fight. It was to get in and get out, unseen and undetected. But we were not only
equipped to fight if necessary. From the unit’s earliest days under the sway of
Meir Har-Zion, Kapusta and Gibli and Errol and the other grizzled vets from
Unit 101 and Company A, we had been steeped in the spirit of commandos. Our
training was the most rigorous in the Israeli armed forces, involving not just a
punishing endurance régime but learning to assemble and disassemble, fire and
detonate, everything from handguns to machine guns, makeshift explosives to
grenades and landmines.
The frustration we felt on the first morning of the war was not because we
were itching to fight, for the hell of it. One hallmark of the sayeret’s ethos,
especially once the unit did start to evolve into a full-fledged commando unit,
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was always the principle of targeted force, the idea that we would take out
targets, or defeat enemies, out of military necessity. But even on the first day of
the war, it was clear that it would be by far the most consequential conflict in
our country’s history. There was no mission for Sayeret Matkal, nor, it seemed,
any prospect of our playing any significant part.
The fact that my own role was slightly less peripheral was due to Avraham
Arnan. He phoned me almost as soon as we’d got news of the Israeli air victory,
and told me he had been told to take a few men from the sayeret across the
southern border. Our assignment was to complete our failed attempt to defuse
the booby-trap on the intercept in the Sinai. I quickly drafted in two others from
the unit. One was Danny Michaelson, a friend from Hebrew University, where
we had been lab partners. The other was Rafi Friedman, our paramedic, who
had been with me on several of our missions on the Golan.
Avraham arrived at the base around noon. I got a Jeep and we set off. We
crossed into Egypt around four o’clock in the afternoon and headed for the field
headquarters of Israel Tal. Known as Talik, he was the commander of Israel’s
armored corps, and Avraham knew him well. His wartime division consisted of
the country’s premier tank unit, the Seventh Armored Brigade, and a reserve
brigade. We accompanied them the next day to an abandoned Egyptian camp
not far from El Arish, in the northern Sinai. At least, we’d assumed it was
abandoned. As Talik and Avraham were talking in his command post, we heard a
sudden burst of gunfire, which seemed to come from just a few dozen yards
outside. As everyone inside the command post looked around, Avraham turned
to me and said: “Ehud, don’t you think we ought to deal with it?” Then, to
Talik: “Make sure none of your guys shoots him.”
I got Danny and Rafi. We made our way toward an underground bunker,
which seemed the most likely source of the gunfire. Hugging the wall as I led
the way down a series of concrete steps, I clicked off the safety on my Uzi just
in case. But with the main Egyptian forces in obvious retreat, I figured that
whoever was doing the shooting would have to be shellshocked, or insanely
brave, to put up a fight. There were eight men crouched inside, soldiers and
several staff officers cradling Kalashnikovs, and an Egyptian army general. In
what was obviously at least serviceable Arabic, I told them all to raise their
hands. I made a brief attempt to interrogate the general, but quickly reached the
limits of my linguistic proficiency. So we marched them away and handed them
over to Talik’s intelligence officers.
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This interlude instantly conferred on us the desert equivalent of street cred.
The next morning, Talik agreed we could accompany the Seventh Brigade as it
moved deeper into the Sinai, and peel off when we got closer to Gebel Libni to
complete our “sayeret mission.” Given the early course of the fighting, and our
forces’ rapid advances in the Sinai, I couldn’t help wondering whether there
was any real need to defuse, much less remove, the bugging machinery. But the
very fact that the kirya, in the early hours of the war, had still wanted us to try
was a reflection of the deep sense of apprehension in Israel in the weeks before
the war. Even now, it appeared, there was a concern that the Egyptians might
reclaim the parts of the Sinai which we had captured.
When the armored column got close to Gebel Libni, I pulled our Jeep aside
and headed for the stretch of communications cable where we’d planted the
intercept. For several hours, I tried to accomplish in broad daylight what I’d
failed to do in the desert darkness four months earlier. But it was no use. I
finally told Avraham we’d be better off just blowing it up. I attached an
explosive charge and set a two-minute delay. We watched from a couple of
hundred yards away as the whole assembly disintegrated. Then we rejoined the
Seventh Brigade.
Before sunset on the third day of the war, we reached the Egyptian air base
at Bir Gafgafa in the heart of the Sinai. Even had the war ended then, we would
have been in control of a large chunk of the desert buffer zone which Ben-
Gurion had hoped to retain after the 1956 war. But now, more quickly than even
the most optimistic planners in the kirya could have anticipated, Talik was
poised to move on – toward the Suez Canal, and the main towns and cities of
Egypt. As the Seventh Brigade billeted down in Bir Gafgafa, Talik sent his
reserve brigade westward, in the direction of the canal.
We went with them. The battalion was more mobile than a pure tank force,
but also more vulnerable: lightly armored French AMX-13s and a collection of
the halftracks which I dimly, unfondly, remembered from my tironut. A few of
the AMXs led the way, then a line of halftracks, and more tanks at the rear. I
nosed our Jeep into the middle, behind the battalion commander, a lieutenantcolonel
named Ze’ev Eitan. There were scattered groups of Egyptian soldiers on
either side of us, and they aimed an occasional burst of fire in our direction. But
there seemed little point in shooting back. We didn’t need to fight, and it was
clear that the Egyptians didn’t really want to.
Shortly before dark, Lieutenant-Colonel Eitan brought our column to halt.
The road we were on cut through tall sandunes on either side. We knew there
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were still Egyptian soldiers around us, though I doubt any of us expected
trouble. Still, there were well-established rules for setting up a defensible
position when an armored force halts for the night. As Eitan briefed his officers,
I stood a few feet off to the side and listened. Suddenly, the commander of his
AMX company interrupted. “Sir,” he said, “why are we staying here – right on
the main road? There are Egyptians still out there. Behind us, for sure. And any
force ahead of us will run straight into us. Why not a few hundred yards off to
the side, in a place that gives us a view of any enemy movement, or allows us to
ambush an approaching force?” I could see that he was right. I expected Eitan to
agree and alter the arrangements. But he didn’t. I think that, having ordered his
men to encamp on the road 20 minutes earlier, he was reluctant to get his tanks
and halftracks moving again. No doubt, some of the exhausted crews were
already asleep.
I parked our Jeep a few yards off the road. We organized a series of watches:
Avraham, then Rafi and Danny, with me taking the pre-dawn stretch. A few
hours later, Rafi nudged me awake. “I heard something,” he said, pointing west
toward the Suez Canal. “It was faint. But I think so.” I told him to keep
listening. For a while, everything seemed fine. Then, Danny woke me up. He
said he was sure he heard a faint tremor, as if from tanks or APCs. I put my ear
to the ground. I heard it too. I told him to go to Eitan’s command halftrack,
insist he be woken up, and tell him. When he got back, Danny said: “I told
him.”
“And?”
“Don’t know,” he replied. “He said I could go.” I tried to grab a bit more
sleep before my watch. But barely 15 minutes later, Danny jostled me awake
again. “I’m sure now,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s closer.” I went off to find
Eitan. But before I got there, a column of Egyptian T-55 tanks suddenly
appeared on the road, 50 yards from the front of our column. I’m sure they were
every bit as surprised as we were to be face-to-face with enemy armor. But they
knew what to do. They opened fire.
Had we been deployed a few hundred yards off the road, we’d have seen
them coming. If the battalion commander had acted on Danny’s warning, we’d
have had an extra 20 minutes to prepare. But the shells jolted our crews awake.
Within 30 seconds, they were returning fire. But our tanks barely dented the
heavily armored T- 55s. Nearly every one of theirs seemed to score a direct hit.
Within minutes, a number of our halftracks, and one of our tanks, were in
flames.
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Now that we were in a fight –the single fiercest battle in Israel’s advance
across the Sinai – Lieutenant-Colonel Eitan reacted swiftly. Standing tall amid the
shellfire and the flames, he radioed for supporting fire, only to be told that none of
our artillery batteries was within range. Realizing we couldn’t penetrate the
front armor of the Egyptian tanks, he ordered a platoon from the rear to leave
the road and fire on the Egyptians’ from their flank. When one T-55 was hit and
started to burn, he ordered the rest of us to collect the dead and wounded and
retreat toward Bir Gafgafa.
As we pulled back, we encountered a company of Centurion tanks from the
Seventh Brigade, sent in to relieve us. We pulled off the road to let them pass.
The battle ended up raging for another hour. By the time it was over, the
Egyptian tank unit was nearly destroyed. But almost two dozen of Eitan’s
reservists had been killed. A few days later, I learned that the commander of the
Centurions had also been killed. His name was Shamai Kaplan. Though I didn’t
know him personally, he was married to one of my kibbutz “sisters” from
Mishmar Hasharon.
* * *
The pace of the war, its intensity, and the transformative capture of territory
across our 1948 borders had accelerated dramatically since we’d joined the
reserve battalion’s ill-fated advance toward the canal. Back at Bir Gafgafa, we
learned that Israeli troops had broken through in fierce fighting with the
Jordanians and taken the whole of east Jerusalem, including the Old City and
the site of the remains of the ancient temple. The news sent a shiver down my
spine. I was still only 25, a kibbutznik raised on the assertively secular creed of
Gordinian Zionism. But I was old enough to remember the war of 1948, the
bitter struggle for the ancient city in which Judaism had been born, the packages
of food we had sent to try to help break the siege there, and the division of
Jerusalem at the end of the war, leaving us with only its newer, western half.
And while I may not have read the Torah in the same way as a religiously
observant Jew, the meaning of Jerusalem was no less powerful for me. It was
part of our people’s history, of who we were, where we’d come from and how
we had ended up in the place where I’d been born, where I’d grown up, and
which I’d spent the early part of my adult life defending. This was no less true
of the biblical sites of Judaea and Samaria – the West Bank of the Jordan river.
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Places like Bet El, Shiloh, or Hebron. They represented the historic wellspring
not just of the state we’d created, but of Jewish civilization, our heritage, our
moral and ethical foundation. As I drove back to Tel Aviv with Avraham and
the others on the morning of fourth day of the war, we heard Israeli ground
forces were consolidating their hold there as well.
After dropping Avraham at the kirya, we drove back to the sayeret base, but
it was nearly empty. The main fighting was now with Syrian armored units on
the Golan Heights, and most of the men in the unit had gone north in the hope
of joining what seemed likely to be the final stage of the war. Although the
precise outcome was not yet clear, there was a dawning certainty, almost
surreal, that
Israel was gaining control of all the areas across our 1948 borders from
which the Arab states around us had shelled Israeli farming settlements, or
facilitated fedayeen attacks and ambushes against our citizens – the very border
areas where I’d led intelligence operations in Sayeret Matkal.
I, too, drove north. Not far from Kibbutz Dan, the staging point for our first
Golan operation, I linked up with a group of other sayeret reservists. Israeli
tanks had already broken the main resistance of the Syrians, but fighting was
continuing in a few parts of the Golan. In the western corner of the Heights
which bordered Lebanon, several villages still lay beyond the Israeli advance.
We got an order to see if we could take them. It took barely an hour, against no
more resistance than I’d met in “capturing” the Egyptians in the Sinai bunker.
By the time we had made our way back across the Golan to the now-abandoned
Syrian headquarters in Quneitra, it was sunset. The war was drawing to a close.
I gave my Jeep to a couple of paratroopers and hot-wired a more comfortable
mode of transport back home: a big, black Mercedes which had obviously
belonged to a senior Syrian officer. If only because of the license plates, I
avoided the main road back into Israel. I found a dirt track running between
Syrian positions on the southern edge of the Golan and descended toward the
fruit groves of Kibbutz Ha’on, near the Sea of Galilee. I then headed for
Givataim in north Tel Aviv, to a place I knew well. It was the home of
Menachem Digli. He had been Avraham Arnan’s deputy in the sayeret when I
left for my stint in officers’ school. Before I returned to the unit, he had a
motorcycle accident, badly damaging his leg. He’d been temporarily reassigned
to a post in intelligence. I figured a Syrian Mercedes would make a nice gift.
Not wanting to wake him, I left it in front of his house. Sadly, he never got to
use it. The next day a couple of military policemen knocked on his door and
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asked what he knew about the car outside. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine.”
They took it away.
As insistently as I, and others in Sayeret Matkal, had wanted to play our part
on the battlefields of the Six-Day War – in the Sinai, on the Golan, in the bitter
battle to capture Jerusalem, or amid the olive-green hills and valleys of the West
Bank – we had to accept that, at most, we’d been freelance support troops. Or
mere spectators. But while it would be many years before this was openly
acknowedlged, we did play an important part in the outcome. Because Dayan
had been called back as Defense Minister only days before the war, he had
wisely decided not to alter the plan for the preemptive air strikes. But he did
adjust our ground advance. Just as with Eshkol’s knowledge of the initial
Egyptian advance in the Sinai before the war, Dayan’s judgements were
informed by detailed, real-time intelligence on where enemy tanks and troops
were located, what they were doing, and what how and when they were
planning to advance.
As speculation mounted after the war about how Israel seemed to know so
much the Arab forces, Meir Amit’s successor as Head of Military Intelligence,
Ahrahle Yariv, even engaged in some misdirection. He was anxious to avoid
jeopardizing future sayeret bugging operations. In a speech on how the war had
been won, he included a reference to a “high-ranking spy” in the Egyptian army
who, he implied, had leaked critical information. The “spy” was the series of
intercepts we’d attached to the Egyptians’ main military communications
network in the Sinai, and to the telephone poles on the Golan Heights.
On a deeply personal level, too, the war left its mark on Sayeret Matkal.
Though the fighting had been brief, people did die. Thousands of Egyptians,
Syrians and Jordanians. And about 650 Israelis. Some of were not just people
we knew. They included close friends. Nechemia Cohen, the officer I’d joined in
our failed attempt to defuse the booby-trap in the Sinai before the war, entered
Gaza on the first day in his new role as deputy commander of Amsalem’s
paratroop unit. Amsalem was killed early on, so Nechemia took command. He
was shot and killed fifteen minutes later. To this day, he and I share the
distinction of being the most decorated soldiers in Israel’s history. Had he lived,
I have no doubt that it is an honor he would have held alone.
This was the first close friend from the unit we’d lost. We did not mourn him
openly. For young soldiers of my generation, especially but not only those raised
with the additional kibbutz ethos of stolid self-control, there was an embedded
sense that such individual displays of emotion were an indulgence, and luxury
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even, which the country we were building could not afford. In the early years of
the state, the model Israel mother or father were those who stood silent and strong
as a soldier’s coffin was lowered into the ground.
Nechemia’s death hurt, of course. I was friends not just with him, but his older
brother, Eliezer. Known by his army nickname, Cheetah, he was in charge of the
air force’s main helicopter squadron. He had flown both me and Nechemia on
sayeret missions into the Sinai. Several days after the war was over, before
returning to university, I drove up to Jerusalem to see his family. Cheetah was at
the door when I arrived. Neither of us spoke. But as we embraced, I could feel
my eyes dampen, and there were tears in his eyes as well.
“Our squadron was the one that got the call to bring out the casualties,” he
said. “They ordered the pilot who brought out Nechemia not to tell me he was
dead… until the war was over.”
“He was a wonderful man,” I said. “There was no one better.”
* * *
When I returned to Hebrew University, the country felt completely different.
It was not just the sudden realization that, in military terms, Israel had
eliminated any realistic threat to its existence, important though that was. The
more profound change was physical. The country in which I’d grown up was a
place which felt not just small, but pinched, especially in its “narrow waist” near
Mishmar Hasharon. Pre-1967 Israel was about three-quarters the size of the
state of New Hampshire. Now, within the space of less than a week, the
territory Israel controlled had more than tripled. It included the whole Sinai
Desert, up to the edge of the Suez Canal. The entire Golan. The ancient lands of
Judaea and Samaria: the West Bank. And the reunited capital city of Jerusalem.
Suddenly, we had a sense that we could breathe. Wander, explore. Few of
my classmates were religiously observant. But none of us could help feel the
sense of connection as we walked through the Old City of Jerusalem, or parts of
the West Bank whose place-names resonated from the Bible. I felt especially
moved when I first visited the Old City with my friends, stopping and chatting
and buying things at the colorful market stalls. And, religious or not, when I
stood in front of the surviving Western Wall of the ancient Jewish temple.
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The personal interactions we had with Palestinians in the weeks after the war
were without obvious tension, much less hostility. They were often friendly.
Looking back, I’m sure that was one reason – along with simple human nature,
a desire to enjoy Israel’s new sense of both security and size – that none of us
was inclined to look too deeply, or too far ahead, and contemplate the
implications for our country’s future. I was aware, of course, that the politeness
we exchanged with the Palestinians of Jerusalem or the West Bank were
superficial: a few words across a market stall or a restaurant counter. I did not
pretend to myself that our Arab neighbors were now suddenly inclined to be our
friends.
But I did feel that, having come face-to-face with our overwhelming military
supremacy, the Arab states would, over time, grant Israel simple acceptance.
From there, I believed that we could begin the process of building genuine,
lasting, human relationships and, eventually, peace.
There was a brief period after the war when Eshkol cautioned his ministers
about the implications of holding on to the vast new area we had conquered.
The government formally agreed to treat most of it, with the exception of
Jerusalem, as a “deposit” to be traded for the opening of peace talks. Yet within
weeks, the emphasis in the Israeli political debate shifted to which parts we
would keep: the Sinai and the Golan almost certainly, as well as the Jordan
Valley and a number of areas of past Jewish settlement on the West Bank. The
drift away from any serious talk of trading land for peace was accelerated by the
Arab states’ response to the war. Perhaps that, too, was simply a matter of
human nature, a reluctance on their part to accept defeat. But they appeared no
more ready than before to contemplate peace. Throughout the summer, there
were clashes along our new “border” with Egypt: the Suez Canal. In September,
all the Arab states adopted a platform which became known as the “three no’s”.
They rejected not just the idea of peace, but peace talks, or recognition of the
State of Israel. And in October, Egyptian missile boats attacked and sunk Israel’s
largest warship, the destroyer Eilat, killing nearly 50 people on board.
Without this renewed violence, perhaps, we in Israel might have been able to
consider more deeply the future implications of our victory in the Six-Day War.
The gains on the battlefield, of course, were clear to everyone. We were no
longer a small, constricted country beset by a sense of vulnerability. We were
not only much bigger, but also stronger than the combined armies of the Arab
states. Still, very few people asked themselves at the time what kind of Israel
this implied. We failed to grasp the potential complications in holding on to all
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the land, and of controlling the daily lives, however benignly, of the hundreds of
thousands of Arabs who lived there. Nor, crucially, did we ponder the
limitations of military strength, alone, in addressing these questions. We – and I,
too, at the time – were too caught up in a sense of post-war relief, celebration
and, as the months of ostensible normalcy in this new Israel, complacency as
well.
But within only a few years, we would face a dramatically different series of
challenges. First, a campaign of Palestinian terror. Then, another full-scale war,
which began with a surprise attack by Arab armies which we had assumed
would not dare to fight us again.
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Chapter Seven
If you’d visited Tel Aviv in July 1967, you would have sensed a new spirit
of confidence, not cockiness exactly, but a sort of spring in the collective step.
This was not just due to the Six-Day War. It was because the city, if not yet the
rest of the country, had shed the economic austerity of Israel’s first two decades
and was beginning to experience at least some of the consumer comforts which
Western Europe, or America, took for granted. But we were still a decade away
from the first shopping malls, or the upscale cafés and restaurants which
nowadays give places like Dizengoff Street, a few blocks back from the
seafront, the feel of London or Paris on a summer’s day. Television had been
introduced only a year before the war. Color TV was still nearly a decade away.
I can’t say I was surprised to learn, when the archives were opened a few years
ago, that a committee of moral arbiters in our Ministry of Education vetoed
plans for the Beatles to perform in the city. “No intrinsic artistic value,” they
pronounced. “And their concerts provoke mass hysteria.”
Even in Tel Aviv, and certainly the rest of Israel, a kind of cultural austerity
still prevailed, an emphasis on modesty and self-restraint. It was a legacy of
1948, a reflection of the years of shared sacrifice, physical labor, and the lifeand-death
struggles which I, like most Israelis at the time, had experienced
within our own lifetimes. That may help explain why I can remember no one
remarking on an aspect of my character which, once I rose to public
prominence, would attract attention, frequent comment, and sometimes
criticism as well: the fact that I seemed so self-contained, reluctant to engage
emotionally with people beyond a circle of close friends or confidants. My lack
of smalltalk, and the kind of gladhanding and schmoozing that are the currency
of political life. At the time of the 1967 war, I was not yet a public figure. Yet to
the extent those around me would have taken note – family, university
classmates, sayeret comrades, or officers in the kirya – my slight emotional
aloofness, my focus on simply getting things done, and the way I internalized
setbacks, even tragedies like the death of Nechemia Cohen, was not exceptional.
It was, in many ways, simply Israeli.
Yet as Israel, Israeli society and my place in them changed, it would be
suggested to me more than once – not always kindly, when it was from critics or
rivals – that I had a “touch of Aspbergers” in me, a reference to those on the
more benign reaches of the autism spectrum with a special facility for math,
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abstract ideas, the theoretical sciences and, often, music as well. I would always
smile in response, suggesting that such diagnoses were probably best left to the
professionals. I couldn’t pretend, however, that emotional engagement with new
acquaintances, even with people I knew and liked but were not close friends,
was something that came naturally. And it is also true that from my first
experience of the world of numbers as a child on the kibbutz, and as I tackled
ever more elaborate pieces on the piano, I did become aware of what might be
called the upside of “a touch of Aspergers” – if that, indeed, is what it is. I was
conscious of the ease with which my brain translated the complexities into
pictures in my mind. And the joy, at times, with which it allowed me to play
around with, and develop, what I saw.
By the summer of 1967, I had experienced that feeling again, in my first real
encounter with theoretical physics at Hebrew University. After the Six-Day
War, I began seriously contemplating a future as a research scientist, or perhaps
eventually a professor of physics. Two months after the war, I enrolled in a
summer program at the Weizmann Institute, Israel’s preeminent postgraduate
research facility. Surrounded by some of the country’s, even the world’s,
leading scientists, and by post-doctoral students determined to follow in their
footsteps, was intellectually enthralling. But it turned out to have another effect
on me as well. As I thought more and more about the prospect of joining their
fraternity once I’d completed my undergraduate degree, I also heard them
describe the way in which pure science sometimes got submerged in simple
routine, or, more discouragingly, in the politics and positioning and backbiting
of the academic world.
I think what finally changed my mind, however, was a feeling, nurtured on
the kibbutz but solidified by that many nights I’d spent leading sayeret
operations across our borders, that I would find my true purpose in life trying to
make some special contribution to the future course of Israel. I did not for a
moment contemplate politics at that point. Instead, I thought of going back into
the military. I realized that in order to make a significant mark, if indeed I
could, would require me to serve in the regular army, not just an extraordinary
unit like Sayeret Matkal. But I did hope that, at some stage, I’d be given the
opportunity to finish my time in the sayeret as its commander, carrying on
Avraham’s vision and, ideally, building and expanding on it as well. At least if
that part proved possible, I felt that, by comparison, a career in academia would
be somehow blinkered, and surely less fulfilling personally. My sayeret
experience had also taught me something else as well: that protecting Israel’s
security was not just a matter of muscle, or firepower, indispensible though they
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sometime were. It called for mental application, an ability to assess risks, to find
answers under enormous pressure when, inevitably, things went wrong. It
required not just brawn, but brains.
A week before I began my final year at Hebrew University, I went to see Eli
Zeira, the senior intelligence officer who’d so brashly predicted the course of
the Six-Day War, in hopes of sounding out my prospects of picking up my
military career where I’d left off. Despite a yawning gap in rank and age – Eli
was nearly fifteen years older – I felt I could be open with him. Not only did I
know him from Sayeret Matkal, which came under his purview in the kirya. He
was a scientist manqué and was eager, as soon as I arrived in his office, to hear
about my physics studies. When I did manage to turn the conversation to the
army, I told him I was thinking of returning after I graduated. Yet before finally
deciding, I wanted his honest opinion about my chances, at some point, of being
given command of the sayeret. He began with a series of caveats. The choice of
future leaders of the sayeret was not be his to make. When the current
commander, Uzi Yairi, ended his term in roughly 18 months’ time, I’d still be
too young to have a realistic chance. “Maybe even next time around,” he said.
And in any case, I would first need to get some experience in the regular army.
“But then,” he concluded, “my opinion is that you have a very good chance of
becoming commander of the unit.” That was more than enough. I figured that
whether it actually happened would now ultimately be down to me.
My last year at university was the closest thing I would have to a normal
student existence. I was called away only once. But it was for a battle which
would turn out to have a lasting impact on the course of our conflict with the
Arabs, and on the prospects of eventually finding a way to make peace. It was
Israel’s largest military action since the war, across our new de facto border with
Jordan. And it was directed at a new enemy: a fledgling army of Palestinian
fedayeen, called Fatah. It was led by a man that I, like almost all Israelis, had
never heard of at the time: Yasir Arafat. Born in Egypt, as a 19-year-old he had
fought against the establishment of Israel in the 1948 war. Although Fatah had
nominally existed for nearly a decade, it was only now emerging as a political
force, in large part because of the Arab armies’ humiliating defeat in the Six-
Day War. A Palestinian political leadership already existed, in the shape of the
Palestine Liberation Ogranization. But it was based in Cairo. Its chairman was,
for all practical purposes, an adjunct of President Nasser’s leadership role in the
Arab world. Though Arafat had not yet explicitly challenged this state of affairs,
his, and Fatah’s, rise after the war carried a powerful, message for the existing
Arab presidents and prime ministers: their brash promises of victory before the
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1967 war had turned out to be hollow words. It was time for a new generation,
and a new, more direct, form of confrontation with the “Zionist enemy.”
Arafat had set up camp with nearly a thousand men just across the Jordan
River, in a town called Karameh. From early 1968, they had been launching hitand-run
raids, not just on the West Bank but into the Negev. Eshkol’s cabinet
was initially divided on whether to attack his base in Jordan, in both an act of
retaliation and a signal to King Hussein that if his army didn’t rein in Arafat’s
men, Israel would take whatever action necessary. But the decisive moment
came on the eighteenth of March. A school bus near Eilat, in the far south of
Israel, hit a Fatah landmine, killing the driver and a teacher, and injuring 10 of
the children.
I was called up the night before the Israeli attack, as part of a small Sayeret
Matkal contingent which was supposed to play a support role. An enormous
pincer operation was mounted around the Fatah camp and Karameh itself:
including a full infantry brigade, the Seventh Armored Brigade and the
paratroopers’ sayeret. But the resistance they met, both from Fatah and
Jordanian troops, was much fiercer than expected. One of the paratroop
commandos, Mookie Betzer, who would go on to join Sayeret Matkal, told me
how they landed by helicopter and immediately came under a hail of AK-47
fire. Within minutes, several of his men had been killed. Mookie was wounded.
The tanks of the Seventh Brigade advanced from the south. Battling the
Jordanian army, they took losses as well. Amnon Lipkin, who would also later
become a friend and colleague, in both the army and Israeli politics, was in
command of a unit of lightly armored French tanks called AMLs. They, too,
were hopelessly outgunned.
Our sayeret assignment was to block the southern entrance to Karameh as
the Israeli armored force advanced. But we got bogged down in mud as we
made our way from the Jordan River. By the time we arrived, hundreds of
Arafat’s men had already fled the area. Arafat, too, had escaped, on the back of a
motorcycle.
By the time the fighting was over, some two hundred Fatah fighters had been
killed. But nearly 30 Israeli soldiers lost their lives as well, and more than twice
that number were wounded. Politically, the outcome was even murkier. Most of
Israel was still basking in our victory in the Six-Day War. Now, we had
deployed many of the same units, only to fight to what looked like a costly
draw. Arafat and Fatah could claim – and soon did – that they had stood and
fought, and inflicted losses on the victors of 1967.
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* * *
In retrospect, given all the interruptions, I’m a little surprised that I managed
to get through my university studies. My classmates helped. They were
incredibly generous in going through with me what I’d missed, and sharing their
notes, whenever I returned for an extended stint of reserve duty. I’ve seen
interviews with university friends saying I was one of the top students in our
class. But that is more generous than true. It would be fairer to say I was a good
student.Working hard in the final year, I did finish in the upper quarter of the
class, and several of my math and science professors strongly urged me to go on
to graduate school.
But my mind was made up on returning to the army. And as I balanced my
studies with plans for the future during my final months, I still hadn’t given up
hope that Nili would be there with me. When she returned from Paris, we had
started seeing each other again. Whenever I could, I would take the bus down to
Tel Aviv and spend the weekend with her. Everything I’d loved about her since
that first meeting in the kirya, everything I valued in our relationship, was still
there. Yet so, too, were the doubts: whether she was ready to commit herself to
sharing our lives together; and whether a kibbutznik like me could ever truly fit
in to her Tel Avivi world. Shortly before Karameh, she’d invited me to a Fridaynight
party with a group of her friends. It was the first time she was including
me, as part of a couple, in her social circle. But almost from the moment we got
there, I felt out of place. For her, it was just another party, one of dozens she
must have been to since she was a teenager. But I immediately felt out of place.
I didn’t drink. I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t help feeling like a wallflower, or an
alien presence.
Now, I decided there was no point in waiting and wondering. I borrowed a
Jeep from an army friend, with the idea that Nili and I could spend three or four
days together, driving south from Jerusalem into the Negev and the Judean
desert: to be alone, to talk, to see whether we actually had a future. I wrote her a
note, took the bus to Tel Aviv while she was at work, and dropped it through the
letterbox. “I am going on this trip, into the desert,” it said. “I’d love it if you
could come with me. I think it’s important for us.”
I never heard back. I felt crushed, though I tried hard to tell myself it was
better to know where we stood. Years later, she told me the envelope had ended
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up under a pile of mail. She hadn’t seen it until a week afterwards. She said that
of course she would have come with me. She felt angry with herself, and with
me too, for not simply having phoned. But since I didn’t contact her in the
weeks that followed, she figured this was just another one of our times apart. Or
“stupid pride”. A few months later, I heard she was engaged to be married, to a
young man she’d known since their high school days at the Alliance.
I had first met Nava Cohen, the woman I would go on to marry, the previous
year. It was through another Cohen, though they were not related: Nechemia,
my sayeret friend who was killed in the 1967 war. He invited me to Tel Aviv
for a party in the spring, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and introduced us.
Nava was just nineteen, five years younger than me. I was struck not just by the
fact she was attractive, but by her poise, warm-heartedness, and her obvious
intelligence. But she had her boyfriend with her, and I still saw myself and Nili
as life partners. Now, she was beginning her studies at Hebrew University as
well, and, in a way, it was again Nechemia
Cohen who brought us together. Since his death, those of us who knew him
from the sayeret had been looking for a fitting way to remember and to honor
him. We finally decided to set up a living memorial in his name: a Moadon
Sayarim, a center to train young people from all over Jerusalem in scouting and
navigation. We spent six months getting it up and running, and Nava pitched in
with the work.
It wasn’t until a few months after I heard of Nili’s engagement that I finally
asked her on a date. We were in the university library, which had a space where
you could listen to tapes through headphones. I would go to hear classical
music. Nava was studying English literature, and I’d sometimes see her there,
engrossed in recordings of Shakespeare with the text of Hamlet or Macbeth in
front of her. Since I wasn’t shackled by the need to follow the alacks and
alasses, I read the newspaper as the music washed over me. I turned to the
movie section. I circled three films, drew a question mark in the margin and
passed it to her. She looked puzzled for a second. Then she smiled and put a
checkmark next to one of them.
While we came from different backgrounds, the gap was narrower than it
had been with Nili. Her parental home was in Tiberias. Her parents were from
old Sephardi families, with a centuries-long history in Palestine, and were also
solid Ben-Gurion Labor supporters. Her father had fought in the British army in
the Second World War. He now ran the branch of Bank Leumi in Tiberias. Her
mother ran a shop in what was then the city’s best hotel, the Ginton.
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We were married there, in the spring of 1969. My parents and brothers came
with two busloads of friends from the kibbutz. Avraham Arnan was there, of
course. But Ahraleh Yariv and Eli Zeira, two of the military intelligence heroes
of the Six-Day War, also drove up for the wedding, which touched both Nava
and me, not to mention her family and our guests. Years later, as I rose higher in
the ranks of the military, I would sometimes be invited to weddings by officers
under my command. Remembering how much we appreciated Ahraleh’s and Eli
Zeira’s gesture. I always said yes.
* * *
It was only weeks after our wedding that I formally returned to Sayeret
Matkal. Both Nava and I were aware of the additional pressures my military
commitments might place on our family life. But she understood why I’d
chosen to go back, and was supportive. As for me, I was, if anything, more
certain that I’d made the right decision. Israel was clearly facing a whole new
set of challenges to its security. Given the decisiveness, and speed, of our
victory in 1967, there seemed no immediate danger of Egypt’s risking another
full-scale war. In Israel, where Golda Meir had become Prime Minister after
Eshkol’s death from a heart attack, there was also little appetite for returning to
the battlefield. Yet the post-war skirmishes with the Egyptians along the Suez
Canal had escalated into far more than that: what would become known as the
War of Attrition. Nor could there be any doubt, after Karameh, that Fatah’s
influence, militancy and determination would only grow, not least because even
more radical factions within the PLO were ready to step into the breach if
Arafat faltered. Israel needed to find an answer for all these threats.
Uzi Yairi’s term as Sayeret Matkal commander had by now ended, but his
successor was someone I knew well. Menachem Digli was the officer on whom
I’d bestowed my stolen Syrian Mercedes at the end of the war. His leg was now
recovered from the motorcycle accident, and I returned to the sayeret at his
deputy. He delegated full responsibility to me for operational issues. I believed
that the new kind of challenges we were confronting, particularly the prospect
of intensified attacks from the new generation of Palestinian fedayeen, meant
that the sayeret would sooner or later have to broaden its reach, moving beyond
the kind of intelligence operations we’d done before the 1967 war to become
the SAS-like special forces unit Avraham ultimately envisaged. But that was not
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going to happen soon, if only because the intelligence missions now required
were going to be a lot tougher. Israel now had control of the entire Sinai and the
Golan. To tap into enemy communications, we would have to push deeper
inside Egypt and Syria.
Soon after my return, we began planning the sayeret’s most ambitious
mission so far: targeting the main communications system between Suez City,
at the southern end of the canal, and Egyptian military headquarters in Cairo.
We were obviously going to have to go in by helicopter. But we faced not just
the risk of being spotted on the way in. The buildup of Egyptian forces along
the canal now included Soviet-made anti-aircraft missile batteries. We might
easily get shot down.
The mission struck the generals in the kirya as so risky as to border on the
insane. But I was confident that we could make it work. I began talking to the
few senior air force officers who seemed more receptive, as well as to officers
in the helicopter units. Not only had I flown into the Sinai on earlier missions. I
now also had a physics degree. Together, we developed a plan – using the desert
terrain, and drawing on the helicopters’ maneuverability – to calculate a flight
route that could avoid detection by Egyptian radar. As an extra fail-sale, I
proposed using three helicopters, and three sayeret teams. Two would fly
slightly higher, with the express aim of getting spotted, but still evading missile
fire. They would land far away from the real target of the operation. The main
team, with me in command, would also stage a pair of diversionary attacks:
planting explosives on a high-voltage electricity cable, and on the main oil
pipeline from Suez City to Cairo.
Still, for many weeks, the answer from the kirya was no. The man who had
succeeded Rabin as chief-of-staff after the war, Chaim Bar-Lev, dismissed it as
“a plan built on chicken legs.” In the end, what got us the green light was a
further escalation, on both sides, in the War of Attrition. In January 1970, Israeli
warplanes began a series of deep-penetration bombing raids, for the first time
striking targets dozens of miles, in some case hundreds of miles, back from the
canal. The Israeli bombing campaign reduced the chance we’d get shot down and
provided cover for our operation.
Our helicopters took off after sunset, nearly skimming the water and peeling
off in separate directions on the far shore. The other two aircraft headed 120
miles to the south. I led the main team of ten men. We set down a few miles
south of the road from Suez City to Cairo. We unloaded a pair of Jeeps, drove
off, and within an hour had placed our time-delay explosives on the electricity
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tower and the pipeline. But when we reached the site of the underground
communications cable, the mission literally ran into the ground. We dug for
more than two hours, but still hadn’t found the cable, and our mail-order metal
detector stubbornly refused to chirp out any sign of it.
Just when I’d decided to call the helicopter back in to get us, it finally
peeped a faint signal. I still wasn’t convinced, but as we manipulated it back and
forth, it got louder. Still, my instinct was to abort. We’d placed the explosives
on the electricity tower and the pipeline. That would at least divert attention
from our real mission, which meant we could return in a few months and have
another attempt. After all, the part of the operation that had been causing the
most concern in the kirya – our ability to get deep inside Egypt undetected –
had succeeded. We were nearly three hours behind schedule. Unless we worked
a lot more quickly than planned, by the time we installed the communications
intercept and covered our tracks, it would be daybreak.
Digli and several other sayeret officers were following the mission from
their command post in the Sinai, part of the intelligence base our military
engineers had built after the war into a 2,400-feet-high mountain called Gebel
Um-Hashiba, 20 miles back from the Suez Canal. When I radioed in to tell him
I’d decided to abandon the operation, I could hear the surprise in his voice, and
what seemed reluctance as well. “If that’s your judgement…” he said. But
before I could reply that, yes, I felt withdrawal was the wisest course, I heard
him speaking to someone whose voice I also recognized: Avsha Horan. He was
the soldier on guard duty in the command post for our first intercept operation
in the Sinai, the one who’d told me of how Rabin was chain-smoking and biting
his nails when it appeared we might be in trouble. Now, he was a sayeret
officer. Digli came back on the radio. “We can see more from here,” he said.
Then, pausing, he added: “Avsha says he thinks you can still do it.”
I had grown to respect Avsha’s judgement. And while Digli hadn’t explained
what “more” they saw from the command post, I assumed that, since they were
also following the other helicopter teams further south, they were concerned
that the Egyptians had figured out at least that Israeli units were involved. Both
he and I knew that it ultimately had to be my call. Whatever happened, I’d be
responsible. Yet I realized that discussing it further would change nothing, and
time was now what mattered most. “We’ll do it,” I told him, and signed off.
We’d planned for the cable work to take something like five hours, which I
knew we couldn’t afford. With all of us pitching in, sweat drenching our
“Egyptian” uniforms, we managed to finish in slightly less than four. But we
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were still behind schedule. Dawn was 25 minutes away. I radioed the helicopter
pilot with a new pickup point, closer to where we’d installed the equipment
though still far enough, I hoped, to avoid giving away what we’d done. Still, we
barely made it. The sun was rising as the chopper began weaving among the
dunes and wadis on the flight back to Israel. Looking back, we could see flames
leaping up from the oil pipeline in the dim, dawn light.
There could be no doubt the prize was worth it. By the time we returned, the
receiving equipment at Um-Hashiba was, for the first time, picking up real-time
communications at the highest level of the Egyptian military. With the War of
Attrition showing every sign of getting even fiercer, it was a criticial
intelligence advantage. When we landed, not only Digli, but Ahrale Yariv were
there to meet us. Digli, smiling broadly, handed me a small cloth insignia.
“You’ve earned it,” he said, adding that Bar-Lev himself had endorsed my
promotion from captain to major.
* * *
With the Cairo-Suez mission, and a series of other operations I helped run
nearer to the canal, there now seemed every possibility that I would be chosen
to succeed Digli as commander when his term expired. But that was still more
than a year away, in the spring of 1971. With his agreement, I decided to use the
time to do what Eli Zeira had advised me before I made my decision to return:
to get experience in the regular army. The War of Attrition had created a
demand for qualified officers who could command tank units, since they were
playing a key role against the Egyptians along the canal. Along with about a
dozen other middle-ranking officers who had volunteered to move into the
armored corps, I embarked on a course covering every facet of tank warfare:
how each system on an individual tank worked, how to pilot one, load in the
shells, and then calibrate its main gun, aim and fire. We studied
communications protocols, even tank maintenance. We were taught how to
command an armored platoon – a group of three tanks – and then an armored
company of eleven tanks and APCs. Finally, in July 1970, we were given
command of actual companies, with the aim of deploying us against the
Egyptians.
My company was part of Brigade 401, in the Sinai. It was one of the several
armored forces that were rotated, every three months, into action on the front
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line. In a stroke of good fortune, the brigade commander was Dovik Tamari,
Avraham Arnan’s first successor as commander of the sayeret. While we waited
our forward deployment, due in September, he included me in his discussions
with his senior officers on tactics and planning. This inevitably included the
core of our existing strategy: a line of fixed fortifications which we had built on
our side of the canal after the war. They were known as the Bar-Lev Line,
because the chief of staff ultimately had to sign off on them. But the main
impetus had come from Avraham Adan. A former Palmachnik, known as Bren,
he was the overall head of the armored corps.
There were strong critics of the Bar-Lev line, but few more vocal than Arik
Sharon. The very qualities that had made him the perfect choice to lead Unit
101 and its successor commando units – a natural instinct to favor bold,
preemptive attacks, allied with an absolute confidence in his own judgment and
little time for those who challenged it – had stalled his rise up the military
ladder for a few years. But now he was head of Israel’s southern command. He
was convinced that in the event of another full-scale war with Egypt, the Bar-
Lev line would be worse than useless. We’d find ourselves forced to defend a
string of fortifications that could serve no real purpose in repelling a concerted
Egyptian attempt to retake the Sinai. Arik’s preferred strategy was to let the
Egyptian troops cross the canal and then confront them on terms where Israeli
forces had a proven advantage: a mobile battle in the open desert.
When the debate came up in our brigade strategy discussions, I said I
believed Arik was right. From our recent sayeret missions, I said there was no
way the Bar-Lev fortifications could protect us. I knew how easy it had been for
us to operate unseen between Egyptian positions across the canal, and they were
only a few hundred yards apart. On some parts of the Bar-Lev line, there were
six or seven miles between outposts. A whole Egyptian brigade could pass
through.
Very few in the kirya, however, seemed ready to recalibrate our strategy
against the Egyptians. Only later, when the damage had already been done,
would it become clear that the navy was alone in acting on lessons learned from
the fighting since the 1967 war. Having lost its largest warship to a more mobile
Egyptian missile boat at the outset of the War of Attrition, it began focusing on
deploying mobile missile boats of its own. But the air force was showing no
sign of dealing with the implications of the Egyptians’ increased anti-aircraft
capability – even though we’d begun losing planes and pilots to the new
surface-to-air missile batteries Nasser had received from the Soviets. And I
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could see that a similar myopia, or denial, was affecting the armored corps. On
patrol along the canal, I would sometimes see the hulk of an Israeli tank which
had been destroyed by Soviet-made AT-3s. Known as Saggers, they were
portable, allowing a single soldier to fire wire-guided missiles. Their range was
nearly a mile-and-a-half, which was more than the main guns on our tanks. Yet
no one appeared to have addressed the question of what would happen if the
Egyptians used Saggers on an even greater scale in a future war.
I remained in the Sinai through early 1971, but never led my tank company
on combat operations. By the time we were due for our deployment, the War of
Attrition was suddenly over. Neither we nor the Egyptians wanted a return to
full-scale war. With Washington taking the lead, a cease-fire was agreed. Both
sides claimed victory. But both were exhausted. Certainly, most Israelis had
ceased to see a compelling reason for the 1,000 days of fighting. We had lost
about 900 dead: more than in the Six-Day War.
But in one respect, the Egyptians won. Under the terms of the truce, their
anti-aircraft batteries were barred from a roughly 30-mile strip along the canal.
Within days of the truce, however, Nasser began moving his SAM batteries
forward. Before long, there were nearly 100 missile sites in the “prohibited”
zone, giving the Egyptians control of 20 miles or more of the airspace on our
side of the canal. Golda was incensed. So was Bar-Lev. But there was no way,
and no will, to reopen the fighting and force Nasser to move the missiles back.
The cease-fire took effect at midnight on August 7, 1970. I’ve never had
trouble recalling the date, because of a phone call almost exactly 24 hours later.
It was from my mother-in-law, to tell me Nava had gone into labor with our first
child. Since I was due for deployment on the front line, we had agreed weeks
earlier that the best thing would be for her to have the baby in Tiberias, so her
parents could be with her. Now, I got a Jeep and raced north. I reached Tiberias
the next morning. I opened the door to the hospital room and saw Nava,
obviously tired but beaming, cradling our daughter Michal in her arms.
I managed to stay with them for several days before returning to the Sinai.
With Nava and Michal soon settled back into our apartment in the north Tel
Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv, I made weekend visits home whenever I
could. Still, I saw nowhere near as much of our daughter’s first few months as
most fathers. As Nava and I would discover even more jarringly over the next
few years, that was an inescapable part of being an army officer.
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But at least my next posting was closer to home. It was only 20 minutes from
our apartment, on a former RAF base not far from Lod airport. On the First of
April 1971, I was promoted from major to lieutenant-colonel, and given the
assignment which, more than any other, I’d hoped for when I returned to the
army.
I became the commander of Sayeret Matkal.
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Chapter Eight
It was the same jumble of buildings in the same corner of the base where I’d
reported a decade earlier, as a 19-year-old fresh from tironut, when the sayeret
was still a gleam in Avraham Arnan’s eye. Now, I was about to become the first
of his successors to have been chosen from within the unit itself. As I called
together the officers that first morning, I couldn’t be sure whether I would make
a success of my two years in command. But I did know what I hoped that I, and
we, would accomplish: to complete Avraham’s vision. To forge a true specialforces
unit, at a time when the threats facing Israel seemed increasingly to
demand one.
Avraham’s initial hopes and expectations for the unit had been more than
met. Sayeret Matkal had played the key role in erasing the traumas of Uri Ilan
and Rotem, and restoring the morale and effectiveness of Israeli military
intelligence. Time and again, operations which we said we could do – dismissed
as too dangerous, or impossible, by others – proved achievable. Yet as I now
told the team leaders and our other officers, this was no longer enough.
Our intelligence operations still mattered. In fact, we would have to “push
further” across Arab borders, deeper into enemy communications systems. Our
intercepts had given Israel an important edge in the Six-Day War. I assumed –
though naively, it would turn out – that they would be put to use in any future
war. But if the sayeret was to retain its unique role, we had to become a fighting
force as well. One reason, I didn’t even have to mention: we all remembered our
frustration in 1967, when we’d been little more than bit players in the most
important conflict since the establishment of the state. But for me, the main
argument for change was what had happened since the 1967 war: the fact that
Israel was facing a new range of security challenges which other army units,
trained to engage and defeat enemy troops on the battlefield, were not equipped
to meet.
In the War of Attrition, we might not have lost a single inch of territory. But
we had lost tanks and planes. Israeli soldiers and pilots were being held prisoner
in Egypt and Syria. Arafat’s Fatah and the other armed Palestinian groups might
not present a conventional threat. Yet while I’d been with my tank company in
the Sinai, they were fighting a full-scale civil war against King Hussein’s army
in Jordan. The catalyst: a multiple hijacking in September 1970, a sign that they
were turning to non-conventional warfare, and to acts of terror.
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“We’re not starting from scratch,” I assured the sayeret officers, and I could
see some of them nodding in agreement. We had a proven record of success,
under Avraham and the four other commanders before me. We would be able to
rely on the qualities that had proved our doubters wrong in our first intelligence
missions. “We have to stay true to the spirit of Sayeret Matkal,” I said. Every
one of the officers knew what I meant: teamwork, the way we valued brains and
creativity, more than formal lines of authority. The rigor we applied to training
for, preparing for, and executing each mission. And, no less importantly, to
criticizing, and trying to fix, everything that had gone wrong on an operation, or
we’d failed to anticipate.
Though I expected to be leading many of the operations myself, I knew that
we’d succeed or fail on the strengths of the officers around me. I was incredibly
fortunate on that score. Some, I already knew well from my time as Digli’s
deputy. Smart, self-confident, self-starting officers like Amiram Levin, the
stocky kibbutznik from the north with whom I’d worked most closely and most
often as deputy. Avshalom Horan – Avsha – who’d convinced me to risk
completing the mission on the road from Suez to Cairo. Giora Zorea, who, like
me, had come up through the unit and was one of our most experienced team
leaders. And Danny Yatom. Born not far from Mishmar Hasharon, but a city
boy, from Netanya, he was smart, level-headed and a sure-handed organizer,
and with whom I’d somehow clicked from time he arrived in the sayeret. I made
him my deputy for my first year in command.
There were two others as well, both related to Moshe Dayan, but with a selfassurance
all their own: Uzi Dayan, the son of Moshe’s brother, who had been
killed in the 1948 war when Uzi was only months old; and Mookie Betzer, who
was married to Uzi’s cousin. I’m not sure which of the two joined the sayeret
first. Mookie, I believe. But their family ties, far from extraordinary, were part
of how Sayeret Matkal had developed from the start. It had been friends
bringing friends. But also, not infrequently, a cousin bringing a cousin, or a
brother bringing a brother.
This was the case with two other officers, whom I knew less well at first but
who would become key members of my team. In their case, it was the younger
one who joined first. Binyamin Netanyahu – Bibi, as everyone called him – had
been a member of Amiram Levin’s team when I was Digli’s deputy. He’d also
been a part of one of our several – thankfully harmless – failures along the canal
at the beginning of the War of Attrition. The plan was to cross in rubber boats
held together by nylon cord, with the assistance of Shayetet 13, Israel’s
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equivalent of the American navy SEALs. But Bibi’s dinghy got tangled up, and
he found himself in the canal, being tugged down by the current. Only the
SEALs, and Bibi’s mix of calm and endurance, averted disaster.
When I returned as commander, Bibi had gone through officers’ school and
was given a team of his own, making him one of half-a-dozen core, operational
officers with whom I worked from the planning stages of every mission,
through the training and the operation itself. Especially with Bibi, since he was
newest to the role. He was smart, tough and, even by sayeret standards,
supremely self-confident. It also was clear that he understood my determination
to build the unit into a military strike force – which was one reason why he
urged me to bring in his older brother. Bibi was 22 at the time. His brother –
Yonatan, or Yoni – was 25. He had led a company of paratroopers in the 1967
war, before going off to university. He’d taken a bullet in the elbow while
helping to rescue one of his soldiers behind Syrian lines on the Golan. “He
wants to return to the army, and he’s exactly the kind of officer you want,” Bibi
said.
I brought Yoni in for a chat. Over the next several years, I would get to know
him much better, becoming not just friends but neighbors, when he bought a flat
a few floors up from ours. But even in this first meeting, I found him a contrast
to his younger brother. Bibi was practical, detail-oriented. Yoni was a more
complex character. He was interested in history, and philosophy. He wrote
poetry. He would sometimes feel the need to get off by himself, and just think.
He was a man of action, too. Taller and trimmer than Bibi, with a thick thatch of
dark hair swept back from a craggy face, he was the Central Casting image of a
soldier. He also had real, battlefield experience. Not only did I invite him to join
Sayeret Matkal. I put him in charge of our training teams. When Danny Yatom
left the following year to train as an armored officer, I made Yoni my deputy.
However different in some ways, the Netanyahu brothers were close. They
seemed almost driven, to excel and to succeed. As I got to know them both, I
sensed that the drive did not come merely from within. It came from their
upbringing, their family background, and in particular their father. Ben-Zion
Miliekowsky, as he then was, studied at Hebrew University at the same time as
my father, in the early 1930s, and was an impassioned supporter of Ben-
Gurion’s main right-wing Zionist rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. My father
remembered him gathering bemused groups of students during breaks from
classes, standing on an upturned wooden box, and proclaiming that the Arabs
would never willingly accept a Jewish state. Long before the 1948 war, and
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nearly four decades before our capture of the West Bank in 1967, he insisted
that we needed to create a Jewish state in all of biblical Israel: from the
Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
It was through Bibi and Yoni that I got to know their father. After 1948, he
had led a frustrating existence. A specialist in medieval Jewish history, he could
not find a place on the faculty at Hebrew University. He was convinced,
perhaps with some reason, that his outspoken advocacy for Jabotinsky’s
Zionism in a country defined by Ben-Gurion’s had frozen him out. He left to
pursue his academic career in America, where both Yoni and Bibi spent much
of their youth. He always remained bitter about what he felt were unfair,
politically inspired, roadblocks to his academic advancement in Jerusalem.
Though he would eventually return to Israel, he was teaching at Cornell
when his sons became officers under my command in Sayeret Matkal. So there
was a physical distance between father and sons. But what struck me was how
large the father loomed in both of their lives. There was an almost adolescent
admiration, bordering on worship. I remember once remarking to Nava that it
was as if, despite all their physical self-confidence, Bibi and Yoni were tethered
to their father by some mental umbilical cord. They seemed weighted down by a
struggle to live up to his expectations, to right the “wrongs” done to him, and
achieve the advancement and success which the young State of Israel had
denied him. In a poignant postscript, decades later when Bibi first was elected
Prime Minister, Ben-Zion was asked by a journalist for his reaction. “He would
make a very good Minister of Hasbarah,” he replied, a Hebrew word which
translates as something between public relations and propaganda. “Or Foreign
Minister.” But how about Prime Minister, the reporter pressed. Ben-Zion
replied: “Time will tell.”
* * *
Even as we mounted intercept operations deeper into Egypt and Syria, I
made sure that we trained as if we were already the broader strike force I hoped
Sayeret Matkal would become. We mapped out plans for commando operations
against the new kind of security challenges the country faced. We worked in
detail on how we’d carry them out. We prepared rigorously to make sure we’d
be ready. Yet no matter how proficient we got, there was no guarantee it would
actually happen. A bit like Avraham in the unit’s infancy, I had to deal with the
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frustration of trying to convince the generals in the kirya to give us the goahead.
Some of them agreed Israel needed a specially trained commando force.
But not everyone felt Sayeret Matkal could, or should, take on that role. Rafael
“Raful” Eitan was perhaps the most strident. He had fought with the Palmach in
1948. He was an officer in Unit 101 and a commander of the parachutists’
Battalion 890. He was now katzhar, in overall charge of all infantry and
paratroop forces. He insisted that such work required a real sayeret, by which
he meant the paratroopers.
Yet the need for a special-forces unit was becoming increasingly hard to
ignore. By the summer of 1971, a couple of months after I became sayeret
commander, King Hussein’s army had defeated the insurgency of Fatah and a
pair of even more militant partners, the Democratic Front and the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine. That meant a quieter eastern frontier. But the
Palestinian groups rebased across our northern border in Lebanon. When
Jordanian Prime Minister Wafsi al-Tal was assassinated, it proved to be the start
of a series of killings and terror attacks by a new group within Fatah, called
Black September. There was at least some potentially encouraging news from
Egypt. When Nasser died in September 1970, he was succeeded by a less
flamboyantly militant vice-president, Anwar Sadat. Yet in both Egypt and
Syria, a number of our air force pilots were still being held prisoner.
I felt an especially strong motivation to help bring the pilots home. They had
risked their lives for us. It seemed to me we owed them the same. One of the
men being held in Syria, Pini Nachmani, had a personal connection to many of
us in the unit. He had worked with us on sayeret missions. I came up with a plan
that, while undeniably risky, seemed to me to have every chance of success. It
was to abduct a number of Syrians from an officers’ club on the western edge of
Damascus. We would land in transport helicopters a few miles away and unload
a pair of armored cars captured in 1967. But Raful’s view prevailed. I could not
get the approval of the kirya. I did take heart from Avraham Arnan’s support.
He was now Golda Meir’s counter-terrorism adviser. Also from the fact that
Chaim Bar-Lev’s successor as chief of staff was an old friend of the sayeret:
Dado Elazar, Avraham’s Palmach comrade from 1948. Yet winning over the
remaining doubters in the kirya was obviously going to take time.
As so often during my years in uniform, however, Sayeret Matkal’s birth as
a special-forces unit came by force of circumstance: not in an officers’ club near
Damascus, but a few miles away from our base, on a runway at Lod Airport.
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* * *
I was sitting down to dinner with Nava a little before seven on May 8, 1972
when the phone rang. We’d just fed Michael, who was almost two, full of
energy, and showed no sign of wanting to go to bed. “It’s Manno,” said the
voice on the line. Brigadier General Emanuel “Manno” Shaked was Dado’s
chief of operations. “A plane has been hijacked,” he said. “It’s heading for Lod.
It will land in about 30 minutes. They’ve got hostages. Get to the airport. Dado
and Dayan are on their way.”
I called Danny Yatom and told him to get whoever was at the sayeret base to
Lod as soon as possible. But most of the men were on training exercises,
including one team with Yoni deep in the Negev Desert. He immediately began
calling them back. When I got to the airport, I found Dayan and Dado huddling
in a room below the control tower, unfurnished except for a small table in the
corner. Talik was there with them. He was now head of all military operations
in the kirya. Rechavam Ze’evi as well, the head of the central command area,
which included Tel Aviv. So was Ahrahle Yariv, who had succeeded Meir Amit
as head of military intelligence, and nodded glumly as I joined them.
The plane had landed. A Sabena Boeing 707 bound from Brussels to Tel
Aviv, it had been hijacked after a stopover in Vienna. All we knew at this point
was that the hijackers were Palestinians and that there were about a hundred
passengers on board. Dado said that, while we figured out how to respond, we
had to make sure, at all costs, the plane didn’t take off again. It would
presumably go to an Arab country, where we’d be powerless to act. Though
only a handful of my men had arrived, I took the only officer who had, Shai
Agmon, and an El Al engineer to see whether we could disable the hijacked jet.
It was parked well off from the main terminal area. With the El Al man leading
the way, we approached from the rear, crouching low, hoping the hijackers
wouldn’t spot us. The engines were still running, but at least the deafening noise
kept anyone from hearing us as we ducked under the fuselage and the engineer
removed a stabilizing pin from the front wheel. It was an eerie feeling,
envisaging the captive crew and passengers, and the terrorists, a few feet above
our heads but knowing we were powerless to do anything more to help.
Manno had called me not because I’d won my argument to expand the role
of the sayeret. It was the luck of the draw. With the growing threat of terrorism,
the kirya had drawn up a list of installations which might be targeted. Next to
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each, they’d put the name of the military unit to be called up in an emergency.
We’d been allocated Lod Airport, because our base was just 15 minutes away.
Still, as I accompanied the engineer back to the control tower, I tried to work
out in my mind whether we could plan, prepare and train quickly enough to
mount an operation to free the plane later that night.
More than a dozen members of the unit had now arrived, and more were
joining us every half-hour or so. I arranged for El Al to give us a hangar and a
707 identical to the Sabena plane. Shai, Danny Yatom and I took two airline
technicians with us for a closer look at the Boeing. We studied up on it as
quickly as we could, beginning with the cockpit and the front door, which we
saw was too high to reach without a large ladder. But making our way back, we
realized the wings were low enough to climb on to. When, with the help of
Danny, I clambered onto one of them, I managed to get one of the emergency
doors to open by banging hard on the top end with my open fist. I asked the
technicians whether we could expect the Sabena doors to give way as well. Yes,
he said, but he cautioned me that on some airlines, there were passenger seats
next to at least one of the two doors above each wing.
Walking up into the cabin, I tried to work out how we might attack the
hijackers before they were able to harm the passengers, or us. The risks were
obvious. But I felt we had to be ready to act. With the rest of the sayeret still
making its way to Lod, I put Danny in charge of briefing the new arrivals,
familiarizing them with the 707 and preparing for the possibility of an assault
operation. I also told him to get hold of a couple of dozen small, 22-caliber,
Beretta pistols. I couldn’t see how we’d manage to make our way onto the plane
with Uzis. We knew we’d have to get up to speed quickly on using the Berettas.
None of us had trained on them. But many of the air marshals on board El Al
flights were Sayeret Matkal reservists, and they did use Berettas. I told Danny
to check for any sayeret marshals arriving on El Al flights and get them to join
us.
As I headed back to see Dado, we were nowhere close to a detailed plan on
how to confront the hijackers. Nor did we have any orders. The people who
would give them – Dado, Dayan and ultimately Prime Minister Meir – were still
deciding how to respond. But when I reached the control tower, at about
9:30pm, the order came, if not to mount an operation, at least to make sure the
sayeret was ready. “Talk to Talik,” Dado told me. “See what the options are to
take over the plane if that’s the decision.” I sat down with Talik and ran through
what I’d learned from my brief look at the hijacked plane and the work we’d
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been doing on the Israeli 707. I told him I’d need another two hours to make
sure my men had practiced climbing up on the wings and forcing open the
doors, and another hour for preparations and briefings for the teams who would
be participating in the operation. “By about half an hour after midnight, we’ll be
ready to deploy,” I said, though from his stoic, nearly silent response I couldn’t
be sure whether he was in favor of an assault. “By 0100, we’ll be ready to act.”
Both of us went back to see Dado. He seemed encouraged, especially when I
said we’d be ready to move by one in the morning. He told me the pilot of the
plane had been in contact with the control tower. He was an RAF veteran and,
though the terrorists seemed unaware of this, he was also Jewish. The hijackers
were demanding more than 300 Arab prisoners be released and flown to Cairo.
“And they seem quite nervous.”
Returning to the hangar, I sent Shai Agmon with four soldiers to set up a
lookout and sniper post about 70 yards to the side of the Sabena jet. I told him
not to open fire unless they were sure there had been shooting inside the plane
and could positively identify an armed hijacker. By now, we had three dozen
soldiers and officers, including Uzi Dayan and his full team. I took all those
who were already briefed and divided them into four groups, each with an
officer and five soldiers and assigned to deal with one of the wing doors. I left
the others to continue training.
When midnight came, I was far from certain we could meet the 12:30 am
deployment target I’d given Talik. Incoming flights had stopped for the night,
and we still hadn’t managed to bring in any air marshals. I believed they would
give us a crucial advantage. They knew Berettas. They also knew the inside of a
707. But I was worried about losing Dado’s trust in a sayeret operation if we
failed to meet the timeline. From Shai’s lookout post to the side of the plane, I
learned that the front cabin door of the plane was open. He said he’d seen a
couple of hijackers walking by it, silhouetted by the dim cabin light. But
otherwise, there was no sign of activity inside. I called Talik and told him I was
taking my assault teams to the area behind the plane. About a half-hour later, I
confirmed we were ready to begin the operation. Although the plane’s engines
were off now, our approach had been masked by the drone of the generator
brought in to supply power to the cabin. We were lying face-down on the
tarmac, directly behind the tail of the plane but well back. Two rows of 12 men,
plus me and a soldier in charge of the communications. We’d brought along
four small ladders to help us onto the wings. “We want to exploit the darkness,
and the sound of the generator, to cover us,” I said in my final briefing before
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we’d left the hangar. “If they realize we’re there, we get into the cabin as
quickly as possible, any way we can. The first five seconds will ne critical. Act
decisively,” I told the men. “Assume that everyone else will be doing the same.
Trust your instincts. You are trained for this.”
But more than an hour passed as we waited for the green light to storm the
plane. My main concern wasn’t that the hijackers would see us. There seemed
little reason to believe one of them would suddenly decide to take a walk in the
middle of the night. But sunrise was around five in the morning, and there was
no way I could see mounting our assault in broad daylight. If we didn’t get the
go-ahead soon, the chance would be lost. I called Talik several times, making
the point that if we were going to do it, we needed to use darkness as an ally.
The sayeret was a breed of night animals. Other people, even terrorists, would
be less alert and effective at night. But he kept saying he needed more time.
Finally, an hour before sunrise, he called back. “The big boss is on his way,”
he said. I left the others and crept back to meet the Defense Minister, a good
eighty yards from the plane. Dayan greeted me with a whispered hello. In a
way, his arrival reminded me of my first operation in the sayeret when, before
heading north to the Golan, I’d been summoned to brief Tzvi Tzur, the chief of
staff. Tzur had seemed less interested in the details than in confirming that I was
confident the mission would work. Dayan, of course, had as much operational
knowledge and experience as anyone in Israel. Yet it seemed to me that he, too,
wanted to satisfy himself that I honestly felt we were in a position to succeed.
Especially, though he never so much as hinted at this, because two of the
officers I would be taking in with me, Uzi and Mookie Betzer, were members of
his family.
“How do you plan to do it?” he asked. I explained how we would get into the
plane simultaneously, in four teams, and confront the hijackers. I said I was
confident we’d succeed, especially since darkness gave us an element of
surprise, and the terrorists were bound to be tiring. “We can do it,” I said.
“Better now than in daytime.” Dayan merely nodded. He stood there, silent, for
another few moments. “I’ll let you know,” he said, then shook my hand and
returned to the control tower. But fifteen minutes later he sent his reply, via
Talik. It was brief and explicit: “Not tonight.”
For the first but not the last time in uniform, I felt the frustration of finding
my preparation and judgement trumped, without explanation, by a decision
from above. When I got back to the control tower, I made no attempt to hide my
view we should have moved against the hijackers while we had the chance. But
119
Dado sat me down and filled me in on what was obviously a changing situation.
He said the terrorists had allowed the pilot, Reginald Levy, to come see Dayan
and press their demands. He had brought with him a slab of light-yellow
material to demonstrate the seriousness of the risk of saying no. When tested, it
turned out to be exactly what the hijackers said it was: plastic explosive.
The pilot said there were four terrorists: two men with pistols and two
women with explosives and grenades. There were 95 passengers and seven
crew. He’d also confirmed that none of the exits above the wings was blocked
by a passenger seat. He’d returned to the plane without any clear answer from
Dayan on the prisoner release. But before leaving, he revealed that his own wife
was among the passengers. He asked Dayan to promise that Israel would help
care for their daughter if the hijack ended tragically.
By the next morning, that was looking more and more likely. Though the
hijackers were still in contact with the tower, the only visible movement was the
arrival of a representative of the Red Cross. The lead hijacker, who called
himself Captain Rifa’at, was making increasingly forceful demands for the
prisoner release. Our negotiating team did its best to buy time by giving the
appearance we were considering the demand. It was Dayan who came up with
the idea of going further. He told Rechavam Ze’evi, as the head of the central
command area, to begin rounding up hundreds of young Israeli reserve soldiers.
He wanted them dressed them in prison uniforms, and then bused to the airport,
within sight of the hijacked jet. Dayan also arranged for another Boeing 707,
ostensibly to take the “freed prisoners” on to Cairo.
“What then?” Ze’evi asked Dayan. “We’re not really going to put them on a
plane and take off!”
It was after he’d had no real reply that he in effect answered his own
question, inadvertently leading us to the idea of attempting a daytime attack
after all. Talking to Dado and me, he said: “Since we’re going to such lengths to
deceive them, why not just add another layer? Why can’t Ehud’s people take the
role of the airport mechanics?” Looking at each other, Dado and I realized it
was a stroke of brilliance. Dado went to share the plan with Dayan, confident
that he would be no less enthusiastic, which he was. I remained with Ze’evi and
his deputy to work out the details. We agreed they would take care of the
pantomime with the prisoners, as well arranging for El Al to get us the ladder
trucks that airline maintenance crews used, which would allow us access to the
Sabena jet’s front and rear doors as well. That left me free to concentrate on
preparation and training.
120
We had just a few hours to adapt the original plan. Although we’d trained in
close-quarters fighting for my plan to attack the officers’ club near Damascus,
we’d never had to use that skill in a live mission. Nor had we ever used the
Berettas. While we’d disguised ourselves as enemy soldiers or military police
on our intelligence operations, this would be the first time we were taking on
the persona of civilian engineers, with the need to fool armed terrorists on the
lookout for any sign of danger or betrayal. And for the first time in any of our
major operations, we would be operating in daytime.
Now that nearly all our soldiers and officers had arrived, I began arranging
the final line-up of attack teams. We would need six rather than four, since the
new plan would give us access to the front and rear doors. Danny now also told
me that a couple of the El Al technicians had shown him a way of climbing up
from inside the nose wheel into the cockpit. One of the toughest and strongest
of our soldiers, Uri Koren, had tried it successfully on the El Al 707. I told
Danny, Uri and another officer that they would be assigned to attack through the
front door and the nose wheel. I put Uzi Dayan in charge of the tail door. The