emergency doors above the wings, however, still gave us the quickest way in. I
planned to command the operation from the left of the aircraft, because both the
front and tail doors also faced that way. I entrusted Bibi Netanyahu and his team
with breaking in through the main wing door on the far side of the plane.
By noon, we got a further boost. With the resumption of incoming flights,
we began collecting air marshals. One in particular raised my confidence. I
knew Mordechai Rachamim well from the sayeret. He was a Yemeni Jew from
Elyakhin, the moshav near Mishmar Hasharon where Baddura and the other
Yemeni workers lived. He was tall, strong and athletic, naturally agile and quick
to respond in situations of danger. He was also no ordinary air marshal. In 1969,
he’d been posted on an El Al flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv. On a stopover
in Zurich, four gunmen from Fatah’s main radical rival in the PLO, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, leapt out of a car, opened fire with AK-47s
and began throwing grenades. The PFLP assault injured four of the crew and
killed the co-pilot. Armed with his Beretta, Mordechai rushed to the cockpit
window and returned fire. Seeing the attackers were too far away, he slid down
the emergency chute. Once on the tarmac, he shot one of the terrorists in the
head and kept the rest of them at bay.
As additional air marshals arrived, I slotted each of them into an assault team
in place of one of our sayeret soldiers. The next to arrive was Marco Ashkenazi,
a Cairo-born veteran with whom I’d worked on a mission inside Egypt. I put
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Mordechai on the main left-side wing door, critical for the opening moments of
the assault, and added Marco to Bibi’s team on the other side of the aircraft.
It was then that Yoni arrived back from Negev. He insisted on being added
to one of the assault teams. In one respect, that made sense. He had more
battlefield experience than almost everyone in the unit. But there was an
unwritten sayeret rule never to place two brothers together in the line of fire.
“It’s too late,” I told him, with an arm on his shoulder. “Bibi has already been
training his team.” He went off to find Bibi. I thought there was little chance of
Bibi standing down, but didn’t feel I could stop Yoni from trying. Five minutes
later, they came to talk to me. Bibi said: “Yoni wants to replace me. We want
you to decide.” I assumed both of them knew what I’d say. “Today, it’s Bibi,” I
replied. “But Yoni, this is not our last operation. I will make sure you are there
the next time.”
The last marshal to join us was a tall, thin redhead we always called Zur.
He’d had only 15 minutes to begin training when I got word that Dado – along
with Ze’evi and Ahrahle Yariv – were on their way to see a run-through. As
they filed into the hangar, I quickly explained the operational plan. I showed
them how we would push in the wing doors in, and then ushered them inside the
707. Two minutes later, the emergency-door teams climbed on to the wings.
When I gave the agreed two-finger whistle, they stormed the plane. “OK,
gentlemen,” Dado told the team leaders when it was over. “We’ve seen what we
needed.” Before returning to the control tower, however, he took me aside.
“You know they have explosives, right?” he said. When I said yes, his tone
softened. “You don’t have much time, Ehud” he said. “Don’t waste it.
BeHatzlakha.” Good luck.
We still had to outfit ourselves in mechanics’ overalls, and swap the
sayeret’s paratroop-style red boots for black ones. I directed all the men to
conceal the Berettas on a waist-belt inside their overalls. We got acquainted
with our mechanics’ toolboxes. Finally we organized our maintenance
motorcade: four electronic buggies in front, towing four ladders, two short ones
for the wings and taller ones for the front and rear doors. Waiting for the order
to move, I said a final few words. Seeing the determination and nervous
anticipation on the faces of the men around me, I began by reiterating that the
first five seconds would be critical. “We all know that nothing ever happens
exactly according to plan. Each and every one of us has to focus on speed,
momentum and precision. No one can wait for anyone else to act. From the
moment I give the signal, or if we come under fire, each team has to act as if
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they have to accomplish this all on their own. All of us must assume that. Keep
cool. Stay focused. Rely on your instincts. We’re ready for this mission. And
we are going to achieve it.”
One minute after four in the afternoon, we got the word to go. I was in the
lead buggy, consciously trying to look like a civilian, not a soldier. It was about
a mile-and-a-half to the aircraft. I glanced back at the others. Like me, many of
them had been awake for 30 hours or more, in some cases nearly 48 hours. The
air marshals had been plucked off long-haul flights on which relaxation, much
less sleep, was not an option. As before any mission, I knew everyone would be
thinking about what was about to happen. They also realized that if we failed,
the passengers trapped inside the plane would be at the mercy of terrorists
armed with AK-47s and explosives. But I was confident that any apprehension
would be overtaken by adrenalin when as the assault began.
As we got closer, Shai Agmon radioed me. He said two or three people, not
the terrorists, had come out of the plane. One seemed to be the Red Cross man.
They were about 120 yards away from the aircraft. As soon as he’d signed off, I
got word from the command post in the control tower that it was indeed the Red
Cross representative, along with two of the flight crew. They’d been chosen by
the terrorists to do security checks on the “maintenance” men.
I brought the convoy to a halt. The Red Cross man gave each of us a fairly
cursory body search before waving us on. Then, he got to Bibi. Though I had
somehow failed to notice, he had left on his red sayeret boots. In Israel, that was
the equivalent of a neon sign saying: “I am a paratrooper.” Although the Red
Cross man noticed the boots, he at first made no comment. Then, rolling up the
pants leg of Bibi’s overalls, he saw his Beretta – not inside his waistbelt, but
inside the boot. The next thing I heard was an angry spurt of French as the man
called the control tower. For a moment, I feared the mission was over, with
potentially fatal repercussions for the hostages. But whatever explanation the
Red Cross man was given – presumably by Dayan himself, who would not have
held back in conveying what was at stake – it dissuaded him from taking further
action.
As we were returning to the buggies, the Red Cross man told me that
“Captain Rifa’at” had ordered us to pull up to the generator on the side of the
plane. Each of us would then have to walk forward and open the front of our
overalls so he could make sure we weren’t armed. I passed back four orders to
the rest of the men. First, with no exceptions, move your pistol to the back of
your belt. Second: I’ll be the first to go through the inspection. Third: watch
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what I do and do the same. Finally, if our cover is broken, or if you hear
gunfire, we all storm the plane.
I felt as I always did as an operation was about to begin. Along with the
tension, I had a keen awareness of everything happening around me, almost as
if I was watching things in slow motion, in high resolution. When our
motorcade approached the generator, Rifa’at leaned out from the co-pilot’s
window. He was pointing a pistol at us. He seemed to be in his late 20s or early
30s. He had dark hair and a moustache and the hint of a stubbly beard. We
stopped beside the generator. I got out and walked toward the cockpit, halting
about 10 feet away. Looking up the hijacker, I made a conscious effort to appear
curious rather than worried. His eyes seemed a mix of intense focus and tension.
I opened the front of my overalls. Because of the heat, I was wearing nothing
else on top. He nodded his head to signal he was satisfied. I refastened the
overalls and moved off. One by one, the other men passed inspection. Then we
went back and brought the two smaller ladders to the side of each wing, and the
“mechanics” set down to work. I delayed bringing in the large ladders so as to
minimize any risk of arousing the terrorists’ suspicions.
The fact that at least so far they seemed to suspect nothing was in large part
down to Dayan’s misdirection plan. As we began working on the plane, the
“Palestinian” prisoners were disembarking from buses about 300 yards away.
As Rifa’at watched, several hundred men formed long rows. A few of them
waved in his direction. The Boeing which was theoretically going to take them
on to Cairo, to be followed by the Sabena jet minus the hostages, was being
towed into position.
One by one, our assault teams were moving into place. All that remained
was for me to give a short, sharp whistle and the attack would begin. Yet just as
I was raising my fingers to my mouth, I saw Bibi coming toward me from under
the fuselage. He motioned to me to wait. Zur, the last of our air marshals, had a
problem. Having spent 10 hours in the air on the way back to Israel, before
being immediately plugged into an assault team, he had something to attend to.
“He has to take a shit,” Bibi said. Can’t it wait, I asked. No, was the answer. So
I said OK, leading to the most surreal “operational” moment I would witness
during all my years in the military.
The “prisoner release” was now in full flow. Dozens of military vehicles,
and a small army of fire engines and ambulances, had also pulled to the far end
of the runway, out of sight of the hijackers, in case our attack on the Sabena jet
went wrong. Tel Aviv hospitals were on alert. And Zur was crouching and
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relieving himself. He nodded in gratitude when he’d finished, and returned to
Bibi’s team on the far wing. I gave him a full minute to be certain he was in
place.
Then I whistled. From my initial position beside the plane, I saw Danny
Yatom and his team begin to move one of the tall ladders toward the front door.
Shifting my eyes toward the wing doors as the “crucial first five seconds” ticked
by, I saw both the ones on my side of the plane were still shut. I climbed up on
the wing. When I got to the smaller, rear door I saw the main one cave inward
and Mordechai Rachamim rush in. But the soldier on the other door was
trembling and frozen in place. I slapped him, hard, on the back. “Move!” I
shouted. Instantly, he pushed the door in and rushed inside. I then noticed Uzi
and his team had still not entered from the rear. I jumped from the wing and ran
toward the ladder at the back, but by the time I got there, they had made it
inside, and I followed them in.
Everything was over within 90 seconds. As I’d expected, the planning and
training turned out to matter less than instinct and initiative. Within seconds, Uri
Koren managed to get into the nose-wheel assembly. Though he couldn’t
dislodge a metal-mesh panel separating it from the cockpit, he spotted the
outline of a man’s foot above him, fired, and wounded Captain Rifa’at. The
other members of Danny’s team in front were less lucky. With the ladder, they
had no trouble getting to the passenger door, but they struggled to force it open.
When they did nudge it open a crack, one of the hijackers opened fire, slightly
wounding one of the men and forcing them to abandon the attempt.
Mordechai went in shooting, but immediately drew fire and had to retreat.
But Omer Wachman, another air marshal I’d posted on the far wing, was in a
couple of seconds later. Coming face-to-face with one of the hijackers, he shot
him in the head. That allowed Mordechai to get back inside. He quickly
exchanged fire with the hobbled Captain Rifa’at, hitting the hijacker in the side.
As Mordechai ducked down to reload his pistol, Rifa’at managed to lock
himself inside one of the toilets near the cockpit. Mordechai ran after him. He
fired through the bathroom door, then kicked it open and confirmed that he was
dead. Rushing back toward the center of plane, he spotted the main woman
hijacker, wearing a bulky explosive vest. Grabbing her hands, he reached inside
the vest and yanked out the battery pack. With two of the hijackers already
dead, Mordechai had now subdued the third. But knowing that there was still
another woman unaccounted for, he handed her over to Bibi and Marco
Ashkenazi. Bibi grabbed her by the back of her hair, but it turned out to be a
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wig, which came off in his hand. As she began screaming, Marco instinctively
struck her across the face, but he used the hand in which he had his Beretta. The
gun went off, and the bullet grazed Bibi in his upper arm.
When Uzi Dayan had finally got in through the rear door, he’d run up
against a stocky, suntanned man blocking in his way, and fired – thankfully,
only into his midsection. He turned out to be one of the passengers, a filmmaker
from Austria. Still, there was the other woman hijacker to deal with.
Several of the passengers pointed to the floor just ahead of Uzi, where she lay
curled up, holding a grenade with the pin out. Ordering her loudly, sternly, not
to move, Uzi wrapped his hand over hers, extracted the grenade from her grasp
finger by finger, replaced the pin, and had one of his men lead her out of the
plane and down the stairs.
All the hijackers had been either killed or captured.
Tragically, in the initial crossfire, a 22-year-old passenger named Miriam
Holtzberg, had been hit. Although the man whom Uzi had mistakenly shot
recovered, she did not. Yet all of the remaining passengers and crew were now
free and safe, alive and unharmed.
I felt a mix of emotions when it was over: pride, a sense of achievement
against all the odds. And huge relief at having succeeded in ending the ordeal of
the captives. Without my saying so, everyone in the unit understood that my
inaugural comments as commander, about our need to become a full specialforces
unit, were no longer a distant wish. Still, I knew this was only one step,
and I wanted to make sure we kept our feet on the ground. The day after the
Sabena rescue, Israeli newspapers devoted acres of newsprint to how the
operation had succeeded. Since Sayeret Matkal’s existence was still an official
secret, the headline writers called us, variously, a “special” unit, a “select” unit
and even in one case, because of our El Al coveralls, “angels in white.” We did,
briefly, celebrate back at the sayeret base. But as with every other operation, we
went through a self-critical assessment of what we could have done better. How,
if we had to do another hostage-rescue operation, could we make sure none of
the passengers was harmed? How could we improve co-ordination among the
assault teams? And minimize the risk of shooting each other. Why had I, as
commander of the operation, had to wait for someone else to suggest the idea of
disguising ourselves as aircraft technicians? And why had we failed to train
with Berettas and other pistols as well as Uzis?
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They were not just academic issues. Even if we were never again called upon
to free a hijacked airplane, I assumed we would face other operations which
were equally urgent, without the weeks or even months of preparation we’d
always insisted on in the past.
* * *
After the Sabena operation, I emphasized the need for us to be proactive. It
wouldn’t be up to us to decide which operations to do. But it was up to us to
take the initiative in identifying and understanding specific threats and framing
ways in which we could provide a response. Even before Sabena, barely two
weeks had gone by when I didn’t go to Eli Zeira, who was in charge of the
operations department of military intelligence, with a mission which I felt
confident we were ready to carry out. Several of the most complex centered on
the new threat posed by Palestinian groups in Lebanon. Before the civil war in
Jordan, King Hussein had accused Fatah, the PFLP and the equally militant
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine of trying to create “a state
within a state” and deliberately weakening his government. Now, they were
doing much the same in Lebanon. Their headquarters buildings in southern
Beirut were spawning hijackings or terror attacks. From bases in southern
Lebanon, the Palestinians were also firing Katyusha rockets into Israel.
One of the operations I planned targeted Arafat. From our intelligence
intercepts, we knew that a day or two after a particularly intense clash with
Israeli artillery units on the Lebanese border, he would tour the area and meet
with his commanders. If we were going to go after him, however, we needed to
know exactly when he was coming. Fortunately, the Lebanese authorities
tracked Arafat’s motorcade on these “review the troops” excursions, reporting
how many cars were involved, which one he was in, and their progress. Thanks
to previous sayeret missions, we could listen in. In order to ensure the operation
would be on our terms, I proposed that a couple of days before we planned to
move, Israeli artillery target a Fatah rocket site in an isolated area about ten
miles from the border, where there was just a single road in from Beirut. I
proposed landing several teams by helicopter the night before. We would lie in
wait until the Lebanese army checkpoints reported that the Fatah convoy was on
its way. Israeli helicopters and F-4 jets would then cut off the road on both
sides, and we would ambush Arafat’s vehicle.
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When I took the plan to Eli Zeira, he was reading an issue of the French
newsmagazine l’Express and snacking on salted almonds from a dish on his
desk. As I ran through the reason we’d come up with the plan – the bourgeoning
power of Arafat and Fatah in Lebanon – he peered at me over his reading
glasses and nodded. As I set out the details of the attack plan, he listened, with
no obvious sign of approval or rejection. But after I’d finished, he dismissed it
out of hand. He said that Arafat was no longer the battlefield commander whose
forces had fought Israel in Karameh. “He’s fat. He’s political,” he said. “He is
not a target for this kind of operation.”
After the Sabena hostage-rescue, Dado and the other senior officers in the
kirya did seem more receptive to our trying to initiate operations, especially the
plan to seize Syrian officers and trade them for the Israeli pilots. But such a
mission required not just military or intelligence approval. Dayan, and possibly
Golda as well, would have to sign off, and there was little immediate sign of
that. But, once again, events on the ground would force the issue. Early on the
morning of June 9, our intelligence intercepts gave us notice that the next day, a
group of senior Syrian officers was going to make an inspection visit to the
eastern part of the Lebanese border area with Israel. We would have to move
quickly. Within the space of 12 hours, we’d need to plan the attack, organize,
equip and brief the assault teams, make the three-and-a-half-hour drive north,
and cross into Lebanon.
Still, I was determined to try, which marked the start of two of my most
frustrating weeks as Sayeret Matkal commander. The place where we planned
to abduct the Syrians was an area I knew personally: the sparsely settled strip of
land where Lebanon, Syria and Israel met, not far from where I’d helped
“capture” several Syrian villages on the final day of the 1967 war. With the
convoy expected to pass through the next morning, we crossed the border a little
before midnight on June 9. We lay in ambush in dense vegetation a few meters
off a curve in the road, further reducing the time the Syrians would have to react
once they saw us. I stationed two other sayeret teams a few hundred yards away
in either direction, so they could cut off the road once we attacked.
But as the convoy was approaching, I was suddenly contacted by the sayeret
officer we’d stationed in the command post back in Israel. He relayed a message
from Motta Gur, the head of the northern command. Its intelligence unit said
there was a Lebanese Army checkpoint a quarter-mile from the ambush site.
Motta himself was in the south, with Dado, watching a tank exercise. So I
had no way of talking to him. I replied through the officer in the command post.
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“Tell Motta we know about it,” I said. “We’ve planned for it. It’s not a
problem.” I figured there were at most four or five Lebanese soldiers manning
the checkpoint. The last thing they’d want to do is get involved in a firefight
between us and the Syrians. But Motta’s reply was unequivocal. The mission
was off.
When we’d climbed through a bramble-filled ravine back into Israel, I left a
message for Motta. I found it hard to disguise my frustration, and my anger, at
being ordered to abort the attack, especially after my assurances that the
Lebanese roadblock was not a problem. Yet when we got back to the sayeret
base, I realized there was more to his veto than I’d thought. He and Dado had
received intelligence saying the Syrians were likely to make a series of further
inspection tours of the border area, so this would not be our last chance. The
next day, we received word they’d be touring the western part of the border on
June 13. On the Lebanese side, it was known as Ras Naqoura, on ours as Rosh
Hanirkra, where the Mediterranean coastline rose dramatically to a ridge and,
once into Israel, sloped steeply down again toward Haifa.
I took in two main assault teams, one led by Mookie, the other by Uzi
Dayan. We hid in a tangle of bushes about halfway along the road which
climbed up toward the border ridge. I stationed Bibi and his team at the bottom
of the road, equipped with Uzis and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. We
waited, knowing that we’d be able to see the convoy as it twisted its way up
toward us. Again, I had no direct link to Motta. Yet both he and Dado were
following the mission from a command post in northern Israel. We were in
nearly real-time contact through a sayeret officer, named Amit Ben-Horn, right
across the border.
A first vehicle appeared at around 10:30 in the morning. Bibi radioed us. It
was a Lebanese army armored car with a single machine-gun. It drove past and
halted 150 feet on, at the point where the road began to climb. The two guys
inside took out a small table and a couple of chairs and began brewing up coffee
on the side of the road. “All OK,” I said when I radioed Amit to tell him. “Predeployment.”
The convoy arrived two hours later and began to climb. “We’re
taking it,” I radioed Amit.
“Wait,” he replied. And as I kept pressing him for the final go-ahead, another
30 seconds passed.
“Not approved,” he finally barked back at me, clearly wanting to make sure I
got the message.
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“What the hell is going on?” I replied, in a mix of a shout and a whisper,
since I knew the convoy was getting closer. But within a minute, we spotted the
lead Land Rover, which was soon past us on the way up to the ridge. It was
followed by two large American cars, with the Syrian officers, and then a
trailing security vehicle. It was too late. I was fuming. The convoy had passed
within a couple of yards of us, moving slowly because of the incline. But,
regaining my composure, I realized we’d get another opportunity, when the
officers returned from their inspection visit. We now knew exactly how the
convoy was deployed, and with any luck, the security men would be less alert
by the end of the day. Even better, it would be beginning to get dark, perfect
conditions for the ambush.
But as we were waiting, Amit radioed me with a question from from Dado
and Motta. “Where’s the armored car?” It’s still there, at the bottom of the road,
I told them. “But there’s nothing it can do.” Bibi and his team had it in their
sights. I considered not telling Amit what happened a few minutes later: a
Lebanese shepherd, with a half-dozen sheep, stumbled on us. One of Uzi’s men,
fluent in Arabic, tied the startled man’s arms behind his back, scattered the
sheep, and told him: “It’s fine. Another hour or so, we’ll be gone, and we’ll let
you go.” It turned out to be less than an hour. Forty-five minutes. During which,
not once but twice, Amit told us that Dado and Motta were worried: about the
armored car and now about the shepherd. I assured him everything was fine.
We’d do the operation. The guys in the armored car would be helpless. If all
went well, they might not even know we’d intercepted the convoy. The
shepherd, like us, was just waiting for it to be over so we could all go home.
Minutes later, Amit called again. He told us the convoy was on its way down.
But barely 60 seconds later, he said: “It’s off. Don’t do it. Dado told me to
repeat it twice so you’d understand: do not do the operation.”
When we got back to the command post, not only were Dado and Motta
there. Since Motta was within days of leaving to become Israel’s military
attaché in Washington, they’d been joined by his successor as head of the
northern command, Yitzhak Hofi. Three times, I suggested to Dado that we
speak without my officers present. I did not feel it was right to have Uzi,
Mookie and Bibi hear me the generals how I felt. But Dado insisted there was
no reason for them to leave.
“This is a serious issue,” I said, trying to keep my emotions in check. “What
happened out there is unacceptable. An effective special-forces unit cannot
operate this way. For the second time in a week, you’ve made us stop an
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operation. Both times, it was an operation that we, the ones who have to do it,
knew could succeed. An operation on which the fate of three Israeli pilots
depends. One of whom we know personally, and have worked with. Now, again,
with no real reason, you’ve stopped us. I see this as a breach of trust.” When
neither Dado nor Motta replied, I went on: “I have to tell you openly. You can’t
possibly judge the situation on the ground. Only we can. And you’re behaving
as if you know. You can’t know from here. There was no reason for us not to
grab those officers. I don’t want to reach a point when I have to start thinking
about what to report back, or not report, just to make sure we’re free to
complete a mission that you ordered, after agreeing it was necessary for Israel.”
No one said anything for a few moments. I could see that Uzi, Mookie and
Bibi were shocked at having heard me speak in this way to three of the top
commanders of the armed forces. But I meant every word. If Sayeret Matkal
was to function as a special-forces unit, it needed to have the trust of those
who’d authorized an operation in the first place. It was Dado who finally
replied. Sort of. Trying to defuse the tension, he told us a joke from his Palmach
days. “There are two bulls who come into a field full of cows. A young one and
old one. The young one says to the old guy: let’s run over there to the far end of
the field, where the prettiest cow is, and we can fuck her. The old bull replies:
“No need to rush. Let’s go slowly, and fuck them all.”
I guess we were meant to be the young bulls.
I doubt Dado knew whether we’d get a third chance at the Syrian officers,
though I’m sure he hoped so. A week later, we got word there would be a final
inspection visit, to the central sector of the border area. Ordinarily, I would have
led the operation. Now, I made an exception. To Dado’s obvious surprise, I
decided to remain behind, in the command post. “A commander has to be in the
best place to ensure a mission is successfully completed,” I told him. “I’ve
come to the conclusion the only way I can do that is to be here with you.
Because the real bottleneck isn’t out there in the field. It’s here.”
I placed Yoni, who had just become my deputy, in overall command of the
two main teams: Uzi Dayan’s and another led by one of our most impressive
young officers, a kibbutznik named Danny Brunner. He reminded me a lot of
Nechemia Cohen: he spoke little, and softly, but once an operation began was
calm, clear minded and able to anticipate and avoid trouble before it
materialized. Two other teams, one led by Mookie Betzer and the other by Shai
Agmon, would act as blocking units, concealed half-a-mile on either side, once
the main force intercepted the convoy. We chose a spot across from the Israeli
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moshav of Za’arit. We equipped Yoni’s force with a pair of Land Rovers in
Lebanese army colors and had them hide overnight in the moshav’s orchards, a
hundred yards from the road on the Lebanese side of the frontier. The next
morning, when we got confirmation the convoy was on its way, they crossed
and stationed themselves on the road, lifted the hood of one of the vehicles and
made as if they were trying to repair engine trouble. Both the blocking forces
were in half-tracks with heavy machine-guns in case the convoy chose to stand
and fight.
What we didn’t count on was a Lebanese driver, in a VW Beetle as I recall,
puttering along the road shortly after Yoni’s team crossed. The man waved at
them. Quite rightly, Yoni let him drive on. Along with the other obvious reasons
not to fire on a civilian VW, he didn’t want to alert the Syrians and their hosts
there was danger ahead. But the Lebanese motorist, as well as a group of nearby
farmers, were suspicious enough to deliver a warning that there were a couple
of stalled Land Rovers on the side of the road. The convoy halted shortly after
passing Mookie’s force, hidden in a field a few dozen yards away.
Had I not been in the command post, I’m pretty sure what would have
happened next. The mission would have been called off. This time, I was the
one in direct contact with all three teams. Even before I gave the order, Yoni
had anticipated it. He and Uzi turned west to confront the convoy. In a brief
initial exchange of gunfire, one of Uzi’s men was wounded, not seriously, in the
leg. But with Mookie’s team firing from behind and Yoni’s and Uzi’s men in
front, the convoy was trapped, and the Syrians captured.
The safest way back into Israel would have been the way the force had
entered. But Yoni and Uzi realized the main imperative was to get the Syrians
out as quickly as possible. At a not-inconsiderable cost to a pair of American
limousines, Uzi drove each of them, with a total of five Syrian officers, through
a boulder-strewn field across the border.
The Syrians included three senior members of the Operations Department of
the General Staff, and two from Air Force intelligence. Israel made an
immediate offer to swap them for our pilots, though how enthusiastically I’m
not sure. With this kind of leverage on our side, it seemed unlikely the Syrians
would do further harm to our pilots. Our intelligence officers were keen to get
every bit of information they could before sending the Syrians home. It would
be a year later before the exchange was done. Yoni received a well-deserved
tzalash for his role in the mission.
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* * *
Barely two months after the ambush operation in south Lebanon, Black
September seized and murdered members of the Israeli team at the 1972
Olympics in Munich.
As soon as the news broke on the morning of September 5, I phoned Ahrahle
Yariv as head of military intelligence. “You need to send us,” I said. I tried to
persuade him that if it came down to an operation to free our hostages, Sayeret
Matkal offered the best hope that it would not end in a bloodbath. We had the
mind-set, the background, the training and now the experience. I also knew the
German military had no special-forces unit. I’d have been even more worried if
I had known that German law barred the army from operating in peacetime.
That meant any use of force would be left to the police. Ahrahle told me it was
too early to say what involvement, if any, Israel might have. He’d get back in
touch with a decision when it came.
I called my officers together to begin planning. I decided to use the men who
had been with me for the Sabena mission, including Mordechai Rachamim. We
collated information from the stream of media reports from Munich and
assembled a rough idea of the layout of the building the terrorists had attacked.
As for the attackers, I said we had to assume there were at least half-a-dozen,
that they had not just AK-47s but grenades or other explosives. And that like the
Sabena hijackers, they would be prepared to die but hoping to live. All of that
turned out to be true. None of it, however, could alter the reply I got from
Ahrahle a couple of hours later. “We decided to send Zvika,” he said. Zvika
Zamir was the head of Mossad, and he would be going only as an observer. Any
operation against the terrorists would still be in the hands of German units.
The German police’s bungled attempt to end the ordeal was especially
painful because it was so predictable. I believe that if we had been there, at least
some of the eleven Israelis killed might not have lost their lives. The Germans
launched an ambush at a NATO airfield outside Munich, when the terrorists and
hostages were ostensibly on their way to board a flight for Cairo. We know now
that there was no properly co-ordinated plan. Too few police were deployed for
the operation. They were insufficiently armed, and they lacked relevant training
or experience. The result: a bloodbath. As a final insult to the memory of the
murdered Israelis, although the three surviving terrorists were jailed, the
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German government released them to meet the demands of the hijackers of a
Lufthansa airliner the following month.
Added to Israeli public’s shock over the massacre, there was anger at having
to watch the murderers go free. In the weeks afterwards, I got occasional hints
that a sustained Israeli response was underway, though I didn’t know the details.
I was not aware that it was Ahrahle, at the direction of Golda herself, who was
co-ordinating it. Nor that a special Mossad team was at the center of the
operation. Yet from news reports of a series of attacks on suspected leaders of
Black September, I, and most Israelis, assumed we were determined to convey a
message which the Germans had not: that terror killings of the sort perpetrated
in Munich would not go unanswered.
It was not until late 1972 that I knew the full scale of the operation. We had
no formal ties with the Mossad, but our intelligence work occasionally
overlapped. In mid-December, the sayeret’s intelligence liaison was approached
with a “theoretical question” by a couple of guys from the Mossad. Did we have
the capability to attack three separate flats in a pair of apartment buildings in
Beirut. I sent back my preliminary answer a few days later. I said it was
possible. But there was no way I could say for sure without more information.
Would the people in the apartments be armed? Were there guards outside? Was
there a caretaker or concierge? Was there only one way in to the buildings, or
also rear entrances? Would we be able to get a plan of the interior of the
apartments?
In another month, they came up with most of the answers. The buildings
were fairly new, with glassed-in lobby areas and concierges. The Mossad men
also gave us a fairly detailed layout of two of the three apartments. They did not
know whether there were back entrances. They thought it was likely there were
bodyguards, or at least some security detail posted outside. As for the people
living in the apartments, all of them were likely to have at least small arms.
Over the next week or so, we raised a series of other questions. Mainly, I
wanted to know whether they were sure the people we’d be looking for would
be at home. The Mossad officers said they were working on that, but were
confident of being able to confirm this before any operation happened. Though
they didn’t identify the people they were targeting, I had now learned, through
Ahrahle and others, what had been pretty obvious since the Mossad’s initial
approach. They were Palestinian leaders with ties to Black September. “I think
it’s possible,” I finally told them. “We’ll put a plan in place. We can finalize the
arrangements if you come back and say you want us to do it.”
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Nothing happened for several months. By the early spring of 1973, with my
two-year term as sayeret commander winding down, I assumed the operation
had been vetoed. I could understand why. As we worked on our plan, it had
become clear that getting into the heart of the Lebanese capital, hitting the
apartments and getting out again without starting a minor war would be by far
the most difficult mission we had attempted. I did not doubt that Sayeret Matkal
offered the best chance of success. But it wouldn’t be easy. I figured that
whoever was making the decision had come to the same conclusion.
I was on a weekend away with Nava and Michal in the Red Sea resort of
Eilat when things suddenly began to move. At around noon on Saturday, I got a
call from Talik’s deputy in the kirya. “Ehud,” he said, “we need you back here
as soon as possible.” When I asked why, he said: “You remember how you were
approached by someone with some questions, and you went back to them with a
list of other questions for them to answer?”
I told Nava I’d been summoned to a meeting at the chief-of-staff’s office –
the kind of call of duty that both of us were now used to – and grabbed the first
commercial flight north. It got the the kirya early in the evening, and joined a
meeting that was already well underway. Dado was in his usual seat on the
right-hand side of the table he used for staff discussions, flanked by Talik.
Across from them was Manno Shaked, the officer who had phoned me to tell
me about the Sabena hijacking and who had now succeeded Raful Eitan as
katzhar, overall chief of the infantry and paratroopers. Beside him were the two
Mossad officers with whom I’d had most of my dealings about Beirut. They
were all staring at an aerial photo of the Lebanese capital, with an area marked
in blue pen around a street called Rue Verdun.
I entered and took one of the remaining chairs. Gesturing toward the image
of Beirut, Dado turned to me. “Do you know this place?” he asked. Yes, I said.
I’d seen the photo. Nodding toward the Mossad men, I said: “These two officers
showed it to me.”
“Do you have an idea how to do this operation?” I told him that we didn’t
have a fully detailed operational plan. But I said we’d looked into the problems
we’d face. “We believe we can do it.” When he asked how, I outlined the
approach we’d settled on: a small force, thirteen men, plus two from Mossad to
act as drivers. We would need the Mossad men to go to Beirut ahead of us, and
rent a pair of nice American cars, the kind typical tourists would use. We’d land
on the waterfront, well south of the most built-up parts of the city coastline, and
meet up with the rental cars. When we reached the apartment blocks, three
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groups of three men each would take care of the apartments. Four more would
remain outside to deal with the concierges or security guards or any other
interference, and to command and co-ordinate. We’d leave the same way we
came in, by sea.
Dado nodded. I found out later that he’d asked the same question of Manno,
who had proposed a classic regular-army raid. They would block the road with
ten armed paratroopers on each end with the aim of holding off resistance, while
another two dozen went in to the apartments and attacked. I could only assume
Dado concluded that this almost certainly wouldn’t work, at least not without
major trouble. It would certainly forfeit any chance of surprise.
“The mission is yours,” he said. “Manno will be in overall command,
offshore. Because we’re also planning to hit several other targets.”
The reason for the urgent summons was that the Mossad had confirmed all
three Palestinians would be in their apartments in 10 days’ time. Everyone
involved realized that – given its complexity, the obvious risks, and the
inevitable unknowns – the operation could well go wrong. In fact, one reason
for Dado’s “other targets” was to ensure that if it did, there would be successes
elsewhere to provide a credible justification for having sent Israeli forces into
Beirut. As we received further intelligence, new obstacles had to be factored in.
The main one was the presence of a gendarmerie, a Lebanese police post, at the
bottom end of the street, only 500 feet or so from the apartments. And we would
be operating in a crowded, up-market residential area. We could only hope that
at the hour we struck, most people would be in bed. Or out partying. This was,
after all, pre-civil war Beirut, the “Paris of the Middle East”.
In the years since, an extraordinary array of stories has grown up around the
sayeret’s final and best-known mission during my term as commander,
culminating in the dramatic version in Stephen Spielberg’s movie Munich. I
remember reading in one earlier book, otherwise surprisingly accurate, about
our five weeks of intensive training. Even the full 10 days which I thought we’d
been given would have been a bonus. In fact, we had half that as a full team,
since our Mossad drivers, European-born Israelis, had to make their way
through Paris to Beirut as tourists, rent the cars and scout out our route from the
seashore to Rue Verdun.
There were four other operations planned alongside ours: three by paratroop
units and one by the Shayetet 13 SEALs, against a series of Fatah and
Democratic Front installations. Though all of them, like ours, would need help
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from the SEALs in getting ashore, only one required direct co-ordination with
us. This was an attack on a DFLP building a mile or so away in southern Beirut,
led by Amnon Lipkin, the friend whose unit had faced one of the toughest
battles at Karameh. Amnon’s paratroop force would land with us and also pile
into Mossad rental cars. Our attacks would begin at the same time, with the
maximum prospect of retaining the advantage of surprise. When and if we both
completed the operations and got away safely, we would meet up again on the
seafront.
From our first meeting, the morning after Dado gave me the go-ahead, I
realized I would have to make at least one change to the plan to rely on the core
Sabena team. There was no way, after his exclusion from the hijack rescue
mission, that I could refuse Yoni when he pressed to be included. I added him to
Mookie Betzer’s force. I put the other two attack teams under a pair of young
officers named Amitai Nachmani and Zvika Gilad. Both were self-confident,
natural leaders. Both had other qualities I also knew we’d need: focus, and
calm. I would take charge on the street outside the targeted apartments, along
with Amiram Levin. With us would be Dov Bar, a Shayetet 13 officer, and our
medic, Shmuel Katz.
In the hangar at the sayeret base, we made mock-ups of the layout of the
apartments, using bedsheets for the walls and adjusting the dimensions as
further bits of intelligence came in from Mossad. But the real work involved
simulating the whole operation, from the moment of our landing on jet-black
rubber dinghies piloted by the SEALs. We found a new building development
in north Tel Aviv with a pair of apartment blocks under construction. For two
nights, we ran through the whole thing: setting off in the dinghies from a missile
boat off the Israeli coast before midnight, meeting up with our Mossad drivers
on shore, making our way through the center of Tel Aviv to the apartment
complexes and simulating the attack. I wanted to ensure we could pull off the
whole thing without anyone raising an alarm. The one problem came during the
second run-through. A policeman drove by as we were “attacking” the
apartments. Dado managed to convince him that reporting us to his superiors
would not be an especially good idea.
In our debriefing discussions after that exercise, Dado identified a major
problem I’d overlooked. We would be entering Beirut dressed as civilians. Once
we got to the top end of Rue Verdun, we planned to approach the apartments as
if we were party-goers returning from a night on the town. “It doesn’t look
right,” Dado said. “More than a dozen party people walking, all men?” Mookie
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came up with the solution, one that would have the unintended effect of
elevating our mission further in Israeli lore. The three least burly-looking of us
would go in as women: a boyish looking guy named Lonny Rafael, Amiram
Levin, and me.
Still, there was another, potentially deeper concern that had yet to be
addressed. In all sayeret missions, since the beginning, we knew we might end
up having to fight, shoot and, if necessary, kill. Yet now we would be going in
with the expectation of killing three specific men. We had black-and-white
photos: Mohammed Youssef al-Najar, or Abu Youssef, an operations officer in
Black September; Kamal Adwan, one of Arafat’s top military planners; and
Kamal Nasser, a member of his leadership circle and his spokesman.
Nominally, it was understood we would seize them and bring them back to
Israel if possible. I had us exercise how we’d do that. But none of us really
believed that once our teams made it into the apartments, the Palestinians would
surrender. We assumed we would have no option but to kill them.
The killing was not the main issue. After all, I had drawn up a plan a year
earlier to target Arafat himself. Though no one in the sayeret took any pleasure
in having to take a life, at the end of the day we were a part of the army. Black
September, and Arafat’s Fatah more broadly, were not only at war with the
existence of Israel. They were behind a campaign of terror. Certainly there was
no significant public opposition, after the horror of Munich, to going after those
who were deemed to be part of the operational or political direction of Black
September. Our uneasiness inside the unit, however, revolved around what I’d
extolled as its “spirit” when I became commander. Beyond all the specific
qualities we needed to succeed in our operations, our image of ourselves was as
thinking soldiers. We might sometimes find it necessary to kill, but we were not
killers.
As I explained to each of the men I’d be leading on the operation, the
Mossad, Dado, and ultimately Golda had concluded that these three men were
appropriate targets in the wake of Munich. As a battalion-level commander, I
did not feel I was in a position to challenge their judgement, unless we had been
ordered to carry out an attack that was clearly improper or immoral. In that case,
I would have no hesitation in refusing. I said I viewed what we were being
asked to do in Beirut not as an act of revenge, but a deterrent. It was a way of
leaving no doubt in the minds of potential future terrorists that massacres like
Munich carried a heavy price.
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The more difficult question for some in the unit was how we were delivering
that message: breaking into apartments in the middle of the night. Yes, each of
the men was almost sure to be armed. But these flats were their homes. Very
likely, members of their families would be there. If the operation went as
planned, it was hard to imagine how any of the men would have a chance of
surviving. My answer was that ideally we would face them on a battlefield. Yet
given the nature of Black September, that was not going to happen. Mossad was
right to conclude this was the only way to isolate and attack them.
For Amitai Nachmani, who would be leading the attack on one of the
apartments, my words were not enough. Twice, he came to see me. It was not
that he didn’t trust or respect me as his commander, he said. But before leading
his team into Beirut, he needed to satisfy himself that the people we were
attacking, and the way we were attacking them, had been properly thought
through by the people giving the orders. I told him I understood. I did not tell
him that I was actually proud of him for asking – which, although I’m sure he
sensed it, was an omission I regretted when he lost his life in the Sinai Desert a
few months later. But I did go see Dado. I told him what Amitai had said. He
needed no convincing when I urged him to address the entire Beirut team and
answer their questions at our final planning meeting. He did so, explaining how
and why the decision to target these three Palestinians had been reached, to the
satisfaction of Amitai and the others.
We set off by missile boat from Haifa on the afternoon of April ninth. To my
relief, since I suffer from seasickness, the Mediterranean was calm as we
headed west towards Cyprus, before circling back in the direction of the
Lebanese coast after nightfall. I ran through the plan a final time with each
member of the team and then joined Amiram and Lonny in transforming
ourselves as best we could into credible dates for the evening. I’d vetoed dresses
or high heels, in favor of flared slacks and flats. We used standard-issue army
socks to pad out our bras. The Mossad had recruited a volunteer from a Tel
Aviv beauty parlor to help us with our lipstick, blue eyeliner and eye shadow.
The final touch was our wigs. Amiram and Lonny were blondes. I went as a
stylish brunette.
I’m reluctant to take issue with the Spielberg version of events, if only
because he had my part played by someone undeniably better looking than I
was, even as a 31-year-old. But in Munich, we are shown zooming into a
crowded harbor area on a line of motor boats, changing into drag only once
we’ve sprinted ashore, opening fire on a dockside kiosk and shooting our way
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into town like something out of the wild west. Had any of that happened, we
would have started a small-scale war, not to mention run the very real risk of
not getting out alive.
In fact, we left the missile boat, Manno’s offshore command post, in motor
dinghies out of earshot of Beirut and cut the engines as we got closer to the
shore. All of us, including the “women”, were wrapped in ponchos to avoid
showing up on Rue Verdun soaking wet. After getting out of the dinghies, we
were carried ashore by the SEALs to make sure we stayed dry. All of us had
loose-fitting jackets. The attack teams used them to conceal Uzis, explosive
charges to blow the locks on the apartment doors if they couldn’t be forced
open, a hand grenade or two and flashlights for the dash up the stairs. One
member of each team had a large plastic bag, with orders to take away any
easily accessible documents for Mossad analysts back home. As the mother of
the brood, I also had a large purse, in which I carried our radio to communicate
with the team leaders and with Manno on the missile boat if necessary.
Our SEAL pilots steered us well away from the more built-up part of the
seafront towards the Coral Beach, one of the private clubs on the southern end
of the shoreline. Four rented station wagons were waiting, two of them for us
and two for Amnon’s squad. Amnon set off toward the DFLP target. We headed
north towards the center of town. In the Spielberg film, my speaking role
consisted of two words, my name, as I introduced myself to my driver. In fact,
we had already met: during the run-through exercises in Tel Aviv. After we got
into the cars, I asked him how his scouting of the route had gone. He said
basically OK, but that he’d noticed a couple of cops patrolling near the top of
Verdun on one of his drive-bys. I assured him it would be fine. There would be
no reason for a policeman to suspect what we were up to, or who we were. Still,
I could tell he was nervous. “What’s wrong?” I asked. He hesitated before
replying. “I’ve never been in a place where there’s live fire,” he said. I told him
not to worry. He still wouldn’t be. “You’re going to be parked around the
corner, until it’s over. Then, it’s just about getting home.”
When we reached the top of Verdun, it was about ten minutes after one in
the morning. Our cars pulled over. I took Mookie’s arm as we began walking
the 150 feet or so to the first of the apartment buildings. The others followed in
knots of two or three. Both Mookie and I saw a policeman approaching on the
sidewalk. “Ignore him,” I whispered. We weaved a few inches to the side to let
him pass. The buildings were as we’d expected, with their lobbies set back from
a covered terrace in front. As the other teams made their way to the second
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building, I stayed with Mookie. His job, along with Yoni in his expanded team,
was to deal with Abu Youssef, the Black September operations officer. The
concierge must have been on a coffee break. The lobby was empty. The door
was unlocked, so they sprinted toward the interior staircase and made their way
up.
Adwan, the Fatah military man, and Kamal Nasser lived next door. Adwan,
Amitai’s target, was on the second floor. Nasser was on the third. As the teams
raced into the other building, Amiram and I posted ourselves near one of the
terrace pillars, occasionally exchanging a few words of what we hoped would
pass as girl talk. The SEAL officer and Dr Katz were near the top end of the
street as lookouts. We seemed seconds away from what had all the makings of
the operation we’d rehearsed back in Tel Aviv. The one major problem I’d
expected – security guards posted outside – hadn’t materialized. We’d been told
by the Mossad to look out for a grey Mercedes, but it wasn’t there.
The next stage was for each team leader to press the transmit button three
times on his radio. When I’d heard from all of them, I would send a signal back.
Then, at the count of five, each of them was supposed to start the attack.
Mookie’s signal came first. Yet before either of the other two teams checked in,
the trouble began. Suddenly, the door of a red Renault flew open almost directly
across the street from where Amiram and I were standing. A tall, sturdy, darkhaired
man climbed out. He looked across at us. He opened his leather jacket.
He pulled out a pistol and started to approach us. “Ein breirah,” I whispered to
Amiram. “No choice.” To this day, I remember the shock on the man’s face as
he watched us – a pair of 30something women – open our jackets and pull out
Uzis. Fortunately for him, we’d had to make allowances for concealment in
choosing our weapons. We’d left the Uzis’ stabilizing shoulder braces behind.
As our first shots hit, he had half-turned to run. Though wounded, he somehow
got back in the car. We kept shooting but he managed to drag himself out of the
far door and roll behind a waist-high wall on the other side of the street. One of
our shots obviously hit the electrical innards of the Renault, because the car
horn began blaring full-blast, as if someone had set off a modern-day car alarm.
So much for the element of surprise.
I saw three sets of lights suddenly come on in the otherwise dark apartment
buildings. They were in the flats that Mossad had identified. At least that part of
the plan was intact. These were the Palestinians we were after, and it seemed
they were at home. Seconds later, I heard an explosion. It was from Abu
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Youssef’s apartment, the one Mookie and Yoni had been assigned. Then, bursts
of gunfire from the other building.
A Land Rover was approaching from the gendarmerie at the bottom of the
road. We waited until it was about 50 feet away. Amiram and I opened fire, then
Dov and Shmuel Katz as well. The driver lost control and crashed into the side
of the Renault. There were at least four policemen inside. They, too, rolled
behind the wall on the far side of the street. Using the terrace columns for cover,
we kept shooting. Within a minute or so, only a couple of the cops fired back.
Though the three Palestinians could not know the reason for the gunfire and
the wailing of the car horn, they were now on their guard. When Mookie had
blown open the door to Abu Youssef’s flat – and he, Yoni and the other two
members of his team ran into the apartment – he saw the Black September man
peering out from the bedroom. Mookie raised his Uzi but the Palestinian ducked
inside and shut the door. All four of them fired through through the door. When
they went in, they found not only Abu Youssef but his wife, both dead. When
Zvika’s team burst in on Kamal Nasser, he, too, was ready. Crouching behind a
desk, he raised an automatic pistol and fired, grazing one of the team on the leg.
But in a burst of Uzi bullets, he, too, was killed.
I suspect that Amitai’s face-to-face meeting with Dado may have saved his
life. When he and his team cornered Kamal Adwan, he had an AK-47 raised and
ready to fire. Without even a split second’s unconscious hesitation, Amitai fired
first. His only regret afterwards was that Adwan’s wife and children saw it
happen, and that when they’d blasted open the apartment door, the force blew
open the door of a nearby flat, killing an elderly Italian woman. She had been
one of the Mossad’s sources of information on the Beirut apartments.
Mookie’s team came down first. They joined us, crouching behind the
columns, as sporadic shots continued from one of the policemen behind the wall
across the street. When a second police Land Rover approached, I at first
signaled the others to let it pass. But when it suddenly accelerated toward us, we
opened fire. It swerved, crashing into the rear bumper of the other one.
The other teams were back down now. I shouted for Dov to have the drivers
bring the station wagons from around the corner. When we began to pull away,
a third police Land Rover appeared. It sped up behind us. Mookie tossed back a
grenade. The last thing I saw as we made it to the end of the block and headed
toward the seafront was the front end of the vehicle exploding. We dropped
hollow, needle-sharp spikes out the window of the car as we left, so I knew that
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any other pursuing vehicle would be in no shape to follow for very long. But we
still had to avoid trouble on our way back out. I knew it would be a risk to go
back to the Coral Beach, so we took the shortest route to the sea, straight out to
the Corniche, the city’s main avenue along the Mediterranean. As we got closer,
we could hear gunfire. Obviously, the police, and the Palestinian militias,
realized something was not right. The advantage we had was that they would
have no idea what had happened on Rue Verdun, who we were, or where we
were going.
No sooner had we joined the Corniche than I saw another police Land Rover
about 200 yards ahead of us. This one had a spotlight on the roof, panning both
sides of the road. I told the driver to slow down. About 100 yards or so later,
reaching the place where we’d arranged for the SEALs to meet us, he and the
other station wagon pulled over to the side of the road. The Land Rover kept
driving. We slid down a steep embankment nearly 30 feet to the sea. Two of the
three assault teams had bags full of documents as well. We swam out to the
dinghies. When we had hoisted ourselves in, we headed out at first by paddle,
then under engine power, to the missile boat. The whole operation had taken
about a half an hour, only 10 minutes on Rue Verdun.
I radioed Manno on the way to the missile boat. A half-dozen words: the
agreed code phrase for “mission accomplished, targets achieved.” I could hear
relief in his voice when he replied. At first, I assumed that was because they
hadn’t heard from us during the operation. Our radio link to the missile boat had
gone down when we entered the built-up area around the apartment blocks.
Genuinely, despite Manno’s suspicion that I’d cut the connection. Yet he had
other reasons to exhale when he heard we had got out safely. Amnon’s team had
had a much tougher time. They met resistance from the moment they arrived at
the DFLP building. Two of his men were killed, another wounded. They set off
their explosive charges, but had to fight their way out. They only barely
managed to escape, carrying their fallen comrades with them and linking up
with another team of SEALs near the Coral Beach.
It was a little before six in the morning when I got home. I was careful not to
wake Nava. I’d changed out of my slacks and flats and surrendered my wig on
the missile boat. But I didn’t have the energy to deal with my makeup. The next
thing I remember was my wife standing by our bed as I stirred awake around
noon the next day. She looked at my eye makeup and lipstick, shook her head,
and smiled. She didn’t need to ask where I’d been. Israel radio had been full of
news about a major operation in Beirut.
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* * *
A few weeks later, my term as commander ended. The handover to my
successor, Giora Zorea, turned out to be more elaborate than my arrival, though
not at my instigation. With both Talik and Avraham in attendance, Dado
presented me with my fifth tzalash. It was not for Beirut. Not for the operation
against the Syrian officers, or the unprecedented access our intelligence
missions were providing into Egypt’s military communications. Dado said it
was for all of the above. And not just for leading the unit of which I’d been a
part almost from the start. It was for my part in bringing it to maturity. When I
replied, I am sure everyone knew I was speaking from the heart in saying that
my every moment with Sayeret Matkal had been a privilege. And that this latest
commendation was an award for the achievements the whole sayeret.
Dado did me another good turn. As my stint as commander drew to an end, I
knew what I hoped to do next in the army: to use my tank training to work my
way up the command chain in the armored corps. But like past sayeret
commanders, it was assumed I would first spend time at the US Marine Corps
staff college in Quantico, Virginia. I had other ideas. I wanted to exercise other
parts of my mind, by doing postgraduate work at a normal American university.
Dado agreed.
I still had to get accepted. The first step was to take the post-graduate entry
exam, the GRE. There were two parts to it. The first involved mathematics and
abstract thinking, the second English language. If my fate had rested on my
English grade, I’d have ended up at Quantico. I finished in the 28 th percentile.
But in the other part, I was in the 99.6 th percentile. I applied to four universities:
Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford. Amazingly, I got accepted by all of them. I
chose Stanford, mainly because it allowed a far greater latitude in choosing my
program of study. Also, the weather.
In early August 1973, Nava and I joined my parents and hers on a sunny
afternoon in Mishmar Hasharon to celebrate Michal’s third birthday and say
goodbye. We were heading to Palo Alto, California, with every expectation of
two years of intellectual stimulation, new friends, new experiences and
something approximating a more normal family life. My “other” family, the
Israeli army, also had reason to believe a period of new possibilities lay ahead.
The threat of terror remained, of course. There had also been a brief bout of
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nerves over military maneuvers by Anwar Sadat a few weeks earlier. But that
had come to nothing. In no small part due to the success of the raid on Rue
Verdun, Israel’s generals believed the balance of strength and security was on
our side and that, at least for a while, Israel could breathe a bit more easily.
But we were all about to be proven spectacularly wrong.
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Chapter Nine
The phone rang in our apartment in Palo Alto at 4:30 in the morning. We had
been in the US for barely six weeks. It was the Sixth of October 1973: Yom
Kippur, the holiest date on the Jewish calendar. I was still a bit groggy from the
night before. We had been out at a get-to-know-you event for some of the
several dozen Israelis, and several hundred American Jewish students, at
Stanford. While I only vaguely recognized the voice on the other end of the line,
her words instantly jolted me awake: “The boss is busy,” she said. “But he
wants you to know. A war has started back home.”
Her boss was Motta Gur, who was by now Israel’s military attaché in
Washington and was my nominal commander for my period in the United
States. “I need to talk to Motta,” I said. She passed him the phone. “I want you
to know I’m going back,” I told him. Motta’s reply took my mind back 15
months, to our on-again-off-again mission to abduct the Syrian officers, with
Motta and Dado in the command post, intent on reining in the “young bulls” of
the sayeret. “Ehud,” he said, “from what I’m hearing, I don’t think we are
missing a major war.”
“What’s this we?” I said. Motta was a general, at the upper reaches of the
armed forces, officially posted to Washington. I was a young officer, just
starting to work my way up the chain of field command. “I can’t afford to miss
even a non-major war,” I said. “I’ll check in with you when I get to New York.”
“Major” would turn out to be, if anything, an understatement. Yet all I knew,
as I kissed Nava and Michal goodbye and got a cab to San Francisco airport,
was that Israel was again at war. By the time I joined the swarm of Israelis
around the El Al desk at Kennedy eight hours later, the picture was clearer, and
more worrying with each new report from back home. Surprise attacks by Syria
and Egypt – armies we’d not just defeated, but humiliated, six years earlier –
had pinned down and pushed back our forces on the Golan Heights and in the
Sinai. Without any advance call-up, many reservists were only now reaching the
front lines.
As hundreds of people pressed for seats on the El Al flight, I was fortunate to
receive a boost up the pecking order from another man in line. Since the Sabena
operation, the existence of Sayeret Matkal had become a bit less secret. Still, the
identity of the sayeret commander was known to just a few people outside the
unit. So skittish were the army security people that before I’d left for Stanford,
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they even insisted I change my name. I was no longer Ehud Brog. I’d
Hebraicized it: to Barak, which seemed near enough to the original. Among the
few dozen outside the unit who did know about my role, however, were
paratroopers who’d joined us on various missions. One of them now told the El
Al people who I was. Not only was I given a seat on the first overnight plane
back to Tel Aviv. I found myself helping the airline establish a priority for
assigning seats to others: first, active officers in fighting units: armor, infantry,
the air force. Then, reservists, with the emphasis on those who’d seen active
service most recently.
As we were waiting to board, I phoned Uzi Dayan and asked him to meet me
at Lod the next morning. Then I called Motta again. “Ehud,” he said, with no
trace of irony, “it is an extremely serious war. Syrian tanks are getting close to
the outer fences of Nafakh” – our main command post on the Golan. “Good
luck.”
Uzi was waiting for me when we landed. Walking to his car, we ran into two
reserve armored officers who had also just arrived home. They expected to be
sent north, to help beat back the Syrian advance. When they asked me where I
thought I’d be going, I said, truthfully, I had no idea. “Wherever I can help,” I
said. Uzi drove us to the bor, the bunker built two floors underground in the
kirya. Usually, it functioned as the day-to-day operations center. But it was
where the commanders of the armed forces operated during times of war.
At officers’ school, we’d heard and read about the importance of throwing
the enemy “off balance”. Now, we were the ones off balance. The faces I saw
around me were gray and drawn. There were dead looks in the eyes of the
commanders and their staff. Some 30 hours after the surprise attack, all the selfconfidence
we’d felt since 1967 seemed to have evaporated. I looked into
several of the rooms where, months earlier, I’d run through operational plans as
sayeret commander. Inside each, a large wall map traced the course of the
fighting. Israeli forces were marked in blue, the Syrians and Egyptians in red,
with a timestamp for each position report scribbled at the side in black magic
marker. But I saw that the latest addition was from at least twelve hours earlier.
It was as if we’d lost track of what was happening, or were simply
overwhelmed by the pace of events.
I spoke briefly with Talik as he walked along the corridor. He looked 10
years older than when I’d last seen him. Then I spotted Ahrahle Yariv, who had
been called back into military intelligence at the start of the war. Looking
surprised to see me back in Israel, he pulled me close to him. “It’s important
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that you came back,” he said. “We’ll need each and every one of you to get the
job done.” Then he hugged me again. It was as if, knowing I would soon be
heading for the front line, he wondered whether we’d see each other again.
I made my way to the office that the chief of staff used in the bunker and
asked Dado’s secretary if I could see him. As she was deciding whether to let
me in, he emerged. Though obviously aware of the seriousness of the situation,
Dado radiated his usual calm and confidence. For the first time, I felt a bit more
hopeful. “Ma nishmah, Ehud? he asked, in Israelis’ everyday greeting. “What’s
up?” I told him I’d just come from the airport. “I can help in special forces,
infantry, armor. Whichever is most needed.”
“Leading a tank unit,” he said. “They’ve suffered heavy losses. Go see
Tzipori.” Motke Tzipori was in charge of organizing the armored units. He sent
me to Julis, the training base between Tel Aviv and Beersheva, where tanks
from maintenance units around the country were being brought. Once they were
reasonably operational, and as more reservists arrived from abroad, I would lead
a makeshift battalion to help reinforce our badly depleted forces in the Sinai.
* * *
I was just one of dozens of officers, in command of thousands of tireless and
courageous troops called on to try to turn the tide. Most were reservists. Many,
like me, had rushed home in the knowledge that for the first time since 1948,
there was the real risk Israel would be defeated. By the time I got my battle
orders – October 14, the ninth day of the war – Israeli forces on the Golan, at
enormous cost, had managed to turn back the Syrian attack. In this war, the men
from Sayeret Matkal were not bystanders. Most of the unit joined the fightback
in the north, where, under Yoni Netanyahu’s command, they took on and
defeated a Syrian commando force in the heart of the Golan. Yoni himself
risked his life to rescue a wounded officer from another unit behind enemy
lines.
In the Sinai, however, the situation remained dire. An initial counterattack,
launched while I was on my way to Julis, ended up in tatters, with whole
battalions all but destroyed, as our tanks came under fire from rocket-propelled
grenades and, above all, the wire-guided Saggers. Israel’s main advantage in
1967 – our command of the skies – was all but gone. By moving their surface-
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to-air missiles to the bank of the Suez Canal after the truce in the War of
Attrition, the Egyptians had created an effective no-fly zone a dozen miles into
the Sinai. After the failed counter-attack, with the commander of the air force
warning that we were nearing our minimum “red line” number of fighter jets,
Golda contacted the Americans to propose a cease-fire in the south. But having
retaken the Suez Canal and pushed into the Sinai, President Sadat was in no
mood to call a halt to the fighting. The only way we were going to end the war
was to retake the canal and defeat the even larger Egyptian forces on the other
side.
To the extent that my part in war was different from other junior officers, it
was because of my history in Sayeret Matkal. Other Israeli sayerets were
attached to specific fighting forces. Sayeret Golan, for instance, was part of the
Golani infantry brigade in the north; Sayeret Tzanhanim, was part of the
paratroopers. But “matkal” is the Hebrew word for the general staff, since it was
the generals in military headquarters who had allowed Avraham Arnan to create
the unit. From the start, we had answered directly to the kirya, which ultimately
had to approve our operations. When I rushed back from Stanford at the start of
the war, I was still just a 31-year-old lieutenant-colonel. I had spent two years in
command of the equivalent of an infantry battalion. But I knew, and in many
cases had worked with, the men at the very top of the armed forces, including
Dado, the chief of staff. So while other young reservists were reporting to their
former units for assignment, my first port of call was the command bunker,
where Dado himself, aware that I’d done intensive tank training before taking
command of the sayeret, ensured that I would play my part in trying to turn
back the Egyptian advances. I also knew, or at least had met, many of the
generals plotting the counteroffensive in the command bunker in the south:
Shmuel Gonen, known as “Gorodish”, who was head of the southern command;
Arik Sharon, who had left the same job for politics a few months earlier, but
was now commanding a division near the canal; and Chaim Bar-Lev, the former
chief-of-staff whom Golda had called back into emergency service. I even knew
the bunker. It was Um-Hashiba, the command and intelligence post from which
we had run Sayeret Matkal operations into Egypt after 1967.
So during the last, decisive 10 days of the war, I would witness first-hand the
tension among our top commanders in the Sinai, especially between Sharon and
Gorodish, since Arik wasted few opportunities to suggest, rightly but not always
helpfully, that his successor was woefully out of his depth. I would lead my
company back across the canal with one of the other main armored brigades in
the Sinai; take out Egyptian missile sites and help restore our jets’ command of
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the skies; strike out alone at night, with sayeret-issue night goggles, to bring
back the surviving soldiers after we realized we’d lost one of our APCs in a
battle with Egyptians; and even, because I’d been there before on sayeret
missions, leading a joint armored force across the Egyptian desert to complete
the encirclement of Sadat’s Third Army and effectively end the war.
Still, the memory which has stayed with me longest – summoning back all
the miscues and misjudgements of some of Israel’s top commanders, and the
terrible price paid by the men on the ground to turn things around – was the
fight for an experimental agricultural facility located just a few miles back from
our side of the Suez Canal.
* * *
On Israeli military maps, it was called the Chinese Farm. In fact, it was
Japanese experts who helped set it up in the then-Egyptian Sinai before the Six-
Day War. When we captured it in 1967, deciphering the characters on the
equipment had evidently proven beyond our linguistic capabilities. Thus,
Chinese Farm. Now, it was back in Egyptian hands. The sprawling complex,
with its web of large irrigation ditches, controlled the main transport corridor
from the Sinai to the bank of the canal.
Before dawn on October 16, one of the battalions in Arik Sharon’s brigade,
under a veteran paratroop commander named Danny Matt, had managed to
cross the canal on rubber rafts with an advance force of some 750 men and a
few dozen tanks. But it was a precarious beachhead, vulnerable to Egyptian air
strikes, artillery and Sagger fire. Hopes for any large-scale Israeli counterattack
rested on moving forward an enormous roller bridge, and hundreds more tanks,
to complete the crossing – impossible without retaking the Chinese Farm.
The first I knew of the scale of Egyptian resistance there was about four in
the morning on the seventeenth. I got a radio call ordering me to get my
battalion ready to move, ASAP. We were attached the other main armored
force, along with Arik’s, assigned to lead the crossing. It was under the
command of Avraham “Bren” Adnan, the former overall commander of Israeli
tank forces. “You’re going north of Tirtur 42,” Bren’s operations officer told
me. Even without checking our coded map, I knew it was the road running
along the upper edge of the Chinese Farm. He told me that the parachutists of
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Battalion 890, under Yitzhik Mordechai, were in trouble. “Go. Find them. Help
get them out.”
I knew Yitzhik personally, from his years in the paratroopers’ elite Battalion
890. I knew the man who was now in overall command of the paratroopers even
better: Uzi Yairi, who was in charge of Sayeret Matkal during my final years of
reserve duty at Hebrew University. Helicoptered into the Sinai just hours
earlier, the paratroopers had been sent to the Chinese Farm shortly before
midnight. As I would soon learn, they had no more idea than I did about what
they were about to face. They were told they were going in simply to clear out
bands of “tank-hunters”. They weren’t told of repeated attempts by some of
Arik’s top tank, paratroop and reconnaissance units to take the farm over the
previous 36 hours – attacks which had not only failed, but had cost dozens of
tanks and hundreds of men. Without artillery, armor or air support, they
immediately came under rifle, machine-gun, mortar and heavy artillery fire.
Our job was to get them out. Ordering my men to get ready for our first
combat mission of the war, I found myself face-to-face with a distraught and
determined friend from military intelligence. Yishai Izhar had arrived at Bren’s
headquarters the day before. When he saw me, he’d asked to join my battalion.
He was a brilliant electronics engineer and was about to assume command of
the technology unit in military intelligence. I told him we already had our
complement of tank crews, and I knew he’d never had any armored training. So
I found him a place in one of our APCs. But before joining military intelligence,
he’d been a company commander in Battalion 890. Hearing that we were going
to rescue his old unit, he insisted on joining me on the lead tank. I tried several
times to refuse, but he said I had no moral authority to stash him in an APC
when we were going in to rescue his friends and comrades. Aware that each
wasted minute might cost more of the paratroopers’ lives, I relented. I told
Yishai he’d be sitting across from me on the turret, right above Yasha Kedmi,
another friend who, having served under me in my first tank company in the
War of Attrition, had asked to join back at Julis. Yasha was our loader and
radio-operator. He got Yishai a machine gun, extra magazines for his Uzi and a
box of grenades.
We moved out through wave-like dunes in total darkness. After the first few
miles, the terrain leveled out a bit. Still, the sand was deep and the going slow.
When we got within a couple of miles of where I assumed Yitzhik and his men
would be, I radioed him. His voice was chilling. “They’re very close to us,
shooting,” he said. “I’ve got many wounded. Get here as quick as you can.”
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As we got closer, I could still see no sign of them. As dawn was about break,
I radioed Yitzhik to suggest he fire off a flare, but he thought that would put
them at even greater mercy of the Egyptians. Instead, he tossed out a smoke
grenade. We spotted it, more than a half-a-mile away, slightly below us and to
our right. I ordered us forward, leaving my second tank company behind for
covering fire. I led Company A, which included my most experienced tank
commander, Moshe Sukenik. Immediately behind us were our APCs, including
two carrying our medical team. My aim was to engage the Egyptian fire while
starting to evacuate Yitzhik’s men to one of the long, dry, irrigation ditches, 600
yards behind us.
We moved forward in a broad line with my command tank in the center. We
held our fire until we got closer. I still couldn’t see exactly where the men of
Battalion 890 were and didn’t want to risk hitting them. Only when we got
within about 70 yards did I spot the first of the paratroopers. They were in
groups of three or four in a thin line stretching 200 or 300 yards on either side
of us. They were lying behind whatever cover they could find: a bush, a clump
of debris, a small rise in the sand. Some were firing. Others were wounded.
From just a few yards away, Egyptian infantrymen were raking them with rifle
and machine-gun fire. They were now shooting at us as well, and we returned
fire. But the Egyptians, far outnumbering Yitzhik’s men, were spread out in a
network of foxholes, in some places connected by trenches. As we moved
forward, I ordered my APC commander to start evacuating the paratroopers
back to the irrigation ditch, with the support of a further group of courageous
reservists from another nearby APC unit.
A shell suddenly exploded 20 yards ahead of me. Others rained in around
our tanks. The source of the fire was straight ahead, about 1,300 yards away:
three SU-100s, Soviet-made World War Two “tank destroyers”. I trained the
main gun of my tank on one of the SU-100s and ordered the gunner to fire. I
used the battalion-wide radio frequency so the others would hear the order. But
when the dust and smoke had cleared, the SU-100s were still there. I ordered a
sight correction and said, again: “Fire”. Still, we missed. It was only then that I
realized why. Almost none of the tanks brought brought into Julis from the
maintenance units had included their “commander’s notebook” with their
checklists for calibrating and firing – a major problem, since many of the
reservists had last been in a tank years before. I ordered the gunners to use their
telescopes, parallel to the main gun, instead.
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We were being hit by small-arms and RPG fire from all sides. On the turret
of our tank, Yishai and I were firing back, our Uzis on automatic, and throwing
grenades. I could hear bullets pinging off the turret and the body of the tank.
Then, from our far right flank, came the shoulder-mounted Saggers, honing in
with their eerie blue-red glow, juddering towards us as the Egyptian soldiers
corrected their trajectories. One of the missiles barely missed us, and the silky
wire from its guidance mechanism was tangled over our turret. I tried using my
binoculars to identify where they were coming from, but it was no use.
To my right, I could see that the APCs had completed their first evacuation
run and were coming back for more of Yitzhik’s men. There was a raggedness
about it all: one APC, then a couple of others, then a gap, then another one or
two. They were doing whatever they could, whenever they could, as the
Egyptian fire continued to intensify. A few of Yitzhik’s men, whether desperate
or dazed, simply stood up and starting walking west, toward the canal, only to
be cut down by Egyptian gunfire.
I directed Moshe Sukenik to take half the company and head toward the
Saggers to try to take them out, even though we both knew that he’d have to
risk heavy fire before they got close enough. He had two-inch mortars on his
turret, but their range was only 500 yards, far less than the Saggers. Every 45
seconds or so, a salvo of Saggers zeroed in on our tanks and APCs. Within a
couple of minutes, two of the tanks were hit. One was on fire. The SU-100 tankdestroyers
were still there as well. Egyptian infantrymen were spraying us with
small arms fire. The whole area was swathed in grayish smoke. Every minute or
two, another tank or APC took a direct hit. There was a smell, too, which, once
experienced, never leaves your memory: the scent of burnt human flesh.
The fire from the foxholes was getting worse. “Run over them,” I ordered
my tank driver. “Start with the foxhole in front of us.” He jerked us forward and
we plowed over the first Egyptian position. “Reverse, get the one to the right,” I
said. As he backed up, I was shocked to see a surviving Egyptian soldier,
shrugging off a thick blanket of sand from his shoulders, raise an RPG launcher
at us from just 15 feet away. We were close enough to look into each other’s
eyes. I raised my Uzi and shot him before he could fire. Rifle and grenade fire
continued from along the line of foxholes. A second length of the Saggers’ silklike
guidance wire tangled over our main gun. Yishai was firing at the
Egyptians from the other side of the tank. We both tossed grenades in the
direction of the worst of the gunfire.
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It was then, suddenly, that I saw Yishai had taken a bullet in the side of his
neck. Blood was spurting from the wound. His face was contorted in pain. He
looked at me, raising his hands upward, as if to say: “I did my best. It’s over
now.” I pressed hard on the wound, trying to stem the flow. But he slipped out
of my grasp and collapsed into Yasha Kedmi’s arms. Yasha propped him up and
kept trying to staunch the bleeding. I turned toward the Egyptian soldier who
had shot Yishai, less than 20 feet to my left. Keeping myself as low as possible
above the turret, I fired into his chest. He tumbled into the foxhole. As I kept
shooting, Yasha told me Yishai was dead. “Are you sure?” I asked. When he
said yes, I ordered the driver to back up. We drove a few dozen feet, to where a
group of the paratroopers was taking cover. With their help, we lowered his
body from the tank, and then returned to the battle.
Barely ten minutes had passed since it began. Two SU-100s were now
spewing smoke and out of action. The third had withdrawn. But the Egyptians
were still firing. Five of our tanks had been hit. Two were on fire. One APC was
smoldering, its commander severely wounded. I knew that if we stayed much
longer, we would end up like other armored units during Israel’s first, failed
counterattack in the early days of the war. We would risk being wiped out. As
far as I could tell, all the surviving paratroopers had been brought out or had
managed to hobble to the irrigation ditch. I ordered Sukenik to abandon his
attempt to take out the Saggers, and we withdrew behind the irrigation ditch.
It was only then that I realized that alongside two of our crippled tanks there
was still a group of a dozen men: six crew members from my battalion and six
of Yitzhik’s men. It took nearly two hours to get them out. We used our tank
guns to try to reduce the intensity of the fire from the Egyptians around them. I
ordered one of our APCs to go get them. I rounded up all our smoke grenades,
and the APC crew used them to create a smokescreen, the only way I could
think of to reduce the danger of being targeted by the Saggers. It worked, but it
required incredible guts for the men in the APC to pull it off.
The battle had required guts of every man in the battalion. They had found a
way to conquer the first and most powerful enemy on a battlefield: fear. I felt it,
too. But it’s easier for a commander. When you’re leading people into combat,
you don’t have time to be afraid. You have to assess and evaluate, second by
second, everything going on around you. You have to make instant decisions
and ensure they’re being carried out. The people under your command are
waiting to hear your voice, and watching your actions, too. If you lose control at
any point, not only is your life at stake. Theirs are too.
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Early that evening, we were ordered to rejoin Bren’s division to be ready for
the crossing. When I reported that three of my soldiers were still missing, I was
ordered to inform the commander of the battalion replacing us to find the
missing men. The fight for the Chinese Farm was still not over. It would be
another 12 hours before, in a co-ordinated push by a strengthened armor and
infantry force, Israeli forces finally drove most of the Egyptians out. What
tenuous gains we’d made until then had come at an enormous price. Of
Yitzhik’s 300 men, nearly 40 were killed, and many others wounded. I’d led
around 130 people into battle. More than 35 were injured. Eleven were dead,
including Yishai Izhar and Motti Ben-Dror, our medical officer, killed while
treating the wounded. One of our missing soldiers was found alive. The other
two could only be brought home for burial.
As I began to hear the details of the previous days’ fighting, I became more
astonished, and angry. Israel’s tactics in the battle for the Chinese Farm had
involved a series of piecemeal strikes by units obviously too small, and
inadequately supported or co-ordinated, to succeed. The problem wasn’t the
choice of units. No one could doubt the record of Battalion 890, or of the men
Arik had sent in before Yitzhik arrived. But there was no way they were going
to take the area on their own. I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t an attempt
to assemble a force that might actually have been strong enough: parachutists,
tanks, artillery. I felt I knew at least part of the answer from the two nights I had
spent in the Um-Hashiba command post before joining Bren’s division. By
dawn on October 16, the first of Arik’s men had crossed the canal. By the
afternoon, although the big roller-bridge was still not ready, a smaller pontoon
bridge was available. Everyone knew we needed to get control of the Chinese
Farm. But all the field commanders were focused the real task, and the real
prize: crossing the canal and defeating the Egyptians on the other side.
Now, at least, the main crossing was underway. Bren had chanced the fact
that, with Yitzhik pinned down at the Chinese Farm and the Egyptians
concentrating their fire on his men and mine, he could get the pontoon bridge
through. From late afternoon on October 17, his first units began to cross. On
the morning of October 18, my battalion joined them. There was still fighting
ahead, and we were part of it: taking out the SAM sites, engaging units of the
Third Army and, with Sadat now pressing the Americans for a cease-fire and
many Egyptian units clearly losing the will to fight on, racing against the clock
to encircle and defeat it five days later.
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When the guns finally fell silent, I had time to give full rein to my thoughts.
There were obviously fundamental questions about how the war had happened,
starting with why we hadn’t known ahead of time that two neighboring states
were about to attack us – despite sayeret intercepts that could have given us
time to call up all our reserves. Disentangling the details would take months.
But we already knew the human cost of those failures. Hundreds of Israeli
soldiers had been killed. The final number would be around 2,800, nearly four
times our losses in 1967. Thousands were wounded, some crippled for life.
Many of the dead were men whom I’d grown up with or served with, including
more than 20 in my own battalion. Some of the dead in other units were close
friends.
I felt exhausted. I also realized that Nava, thousands of miles away in Palo
Alto, and my parents on the kibbutz could still not be sure I had escaped the fate
of so many others. I learned later that my parents had been making daily calls to
Digli, who was working in intelligence in the kirya. Though he had no way of
knowing where I was, he kept assuring them that he had checked with my
commanders and that I was alive and well. Nava had been relying on American
news reports and the relayed assurances from my parents, which she was
seasoned enough as an army wife to treat with skepticism.
I missed her badly, and little Michal. I felt the need to hear their voices. I
drove to one of the brigade communications units. There was a long line in front
of the radio telephone. But within a half-hour, I managed to get a crackly
connection to California. Nava burst into tears when she heard my voice. I told
her I was fine, and that I couldn’t wait to see her and our little girl. Then, my
own eyes dampening, I reeled off the names of friends who had died. In
addition to the brave men I’d lost in my own battalion, there were more than a
dozen others I already knew of. A pair of brothers from Mishmar Hasharon, a
couple of years younger than me, in separate units, but killed within hours of
each other. Another childhood friend, from a nearby moshav, named Rafi
Mitzafon. And Shaul Shalev, a gifted philosophy postgraduate and a brave tank
commander whom I’d become friends with at officers’ school. He’d rescued
three dozen troops from one of the Bar-Lev fortifications in the first hours of the
war, only to be killed trying to get to a tank crew who had taken refuge a few
miles back from the canal.
I’d lost two wonderful sayeret comrades, too: Amit Ben-Horn, the soldier
who’d relayed the order from Motta to abort our second attempt to abduct the
Syrian officers in Lebanon, and Amitai Nachmani, the officer who had
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demanded a meeting with Dado before our attack in Rue Verdun. Amit died in
the fighting near Ismailia, at the northern end of the canal, as Arik Sharon’s
units pushed on after the crossing. The day before the end of the war, both
Amitai and Amiram Levin were part of an operation to take over the Fayid Air
Base across the canal. When an Egyptian RPG hit their Jeep, Amiram was
wounded. Amitai was killed.
I thought, too, of Yishai Izhar: the friend struck down beside me, who I’d
cradled in my arms on the top of my tank, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Oh Ehud,” Nava said. “It’s like 1967 all over again.”
“No,” I said. “Worse. Much worse.”
A few weeks later, I was coming out of the kirya when I ran into another
friend, whom I’d first met at Hebrew University. Like me, he had been a junior
officer in 1967. His name was Ron Ben-Ishai. He would go on to become a top
journalist, covering the military for Israel’s best-selling newspaper, Yediot
Achronot. In the early autumn of 1967, we were still transfixed by the idea of
being able to visit areas of biblical Israel, which for years had been under
Jordanian rule. With a few other friends who were young officers, nine of us in
all, Ron and I embarked on a trek from the southern edge of Jerusalem, weaving
our way through the Judaean Desert toward Kumeran, on the Dead Sea.
Now a very different war had come and gone. I’d fought in it. Ron, as what
is now called an embedded journalist, had been with Danny Matt’s paratroopers
when they’d crossed the canal. He was alongside another of Arik’s units
fighting out of the bridgehead on the far bank of the canal. That both of us had
seen terrible suffering over the past few weeks did not need saying. But Ron
said he wanted to show me something. Fishing into his wallet, he took out a
carefully folded photograph. He had taken it in 1967, just six years earlier, to
mark our Judaean trek. There we were. All nine of us. Young. Full of optimism.
And probably a bit full of ourselves as well.
Ron and I were the only two left alive.
* * *
We had won the war, and not just because our forces were now within 60
miles of Cairo, and only 25 from Damascus. We had been attacked by two huge
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armies: one-and-a-half million soldiers. Thousands of tanks. Hundreds of
fighter jets. Other, much larger nations had endured months, even years, of hell
before prevailing in such circumstances: the Soviet Union, for instance, with its
huge strategic depth, or France, rescued by its American-led allies, during
World War Two.
But any pride in having prevailed was outweighed by simple relief Israel had
survived. Even that was nothing compared to the sadness felt over friends lost,
and the resentment and sense of betrayal toward the generals and political
leaders who had failed to prepare the country for the surprise attacks, or the
initial confusion and dissension in some of our commanders’ response to the
early setbacks on the ground. Dozens of meetings were held in military units
after the war to talk about what had gone wrong. I was not the only young
officer to notice that the higher up the command chain they went, the more
unedifying they became. After we’d heard one too many senior officer finetuning
his account with each retelling, minimizing his share for the huge losses,
a new phrase entered Israeli army slang. Sipurei kravot – “battle stories” – were
the words usually used to describe a normal debriefing process. That expression
was now amended, to shipurei kravot. Battle improvements.
I was assigned to convert my makeshift force into a regular armored training
unit: Battalion 532, and that slightly delayed my reunion with Nava and Mikhal.
But in their absence, I found us a larger apartment in the Tel Aviv suburb of
Ramat Hasharon. Nava and I agreed that at the first opportunity, I’d return to
California and we’d fly back together. I went at the end of the year. We bought
a refrigerator and a washing machine for the new flat – better models, and
cheaper, than those available in Israel – and came home. Those few December
days in Palo Alto were a jumble of emotions. Happiness, at being back together.
But also a sobering sense, now that I was outside Israel for the first time since
the war, of the enormity of the threat we’d faced and the frustration and fear
Nava must have felt as we’d fought to defeat it. The year-end news
retrospectives we watched on American TV were full of film clips from the first
hours of the war, when it looked very possible we would lose. I remember being
struck by the thought that, if we had lost, if Israel had ceased to exist,
ceremonies of memorial and mourning would have been held across America,
probably in Stanford. But that once the shock and sadness had passed, Israel’s
disappearance would not have impinged on a single NFL Sunday, or delayed a
single family shopping visit to J. C. Penny.
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My command of Battalion 532 lasted only a few more months. On April 1,
1974, an official commission of inquiry published its initial report on the war. It
was scathing in its assessment of our intelligence failings, for which it placed
the main blame the officer who had been promoted the year before as head of
military intelligence: Eli Zeira, the man who had addressed us on the sayeret
base before the the 1967 and so confidently predicted the outcome. It also took
aim at two other commanders. Gorodish, as head of the southern command, was
one. The other was Dado. As chief-of-staff, he was held ultimately responsible
for the intelligence failings and for not having ordered at least a partial call-up
of our reserves.
In Eli’s case, I recognized the very fact of our being caught by surprise made
his position untenable. In fact, as I learned more details about what had
happened, I realized the commission had, if anything, understated the
seriousness of his errors. In the run-up to the war, Eli had resisted multiple
requests from other intelligence officers to activate what the commission called
our “special sources” of intelligence: the communications intercepts we’d
planted deep inside Egypt. Worse, he had indicated to the few generals who
were aware of their existence that he had activated them, implying that his lack
of concern about the possibility of an Egyptian was based on our intercepts.
Because Dado was one of the people misled, his fall struck me as profoundly
unfair. He had devoted his whole adult life to the defense of our country. After
the inquiry report, he was never again the same person. He developed an
obsession with fitness and exercise. Psychologists might have called it
displacement activity. I wondered whether it was a kind of self-punishment.
Either way, it may well have killed him. At age 50, less than three years after
the war, he died of a heart attack after a day of running and swimming.
Almost every level of command was thrown into flux after the inquiry
report. So was the political landscape. Both Golda and Dayan bowed to growing
public pressure and resigned. The premium was on finding replacements who
were sufficiently experienced, but did not bear responsibility for the errors of
the war. For Prime Minister, the choice fell on Yitzhak Rabin. He had strong
military credentials, of course. But he had left the army and entered politics, and
had been out of Israel for several years as Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
He had joined Golda’s government only weeks before the war, in the relatively
minor role of Minister of Labor. Much the same thing happened in the army.
Only one of the generals who had been in the running to succeed Dado before
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the war was unscathed: Motta Gur. He, too, had been in Washington. Within
days of the inquiry report, he was called back to replace Dado as chief-of-staff.