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One of the captured Golani soldiers was a 19-year-old named Uri Ilan, the
son of a member of the Israeli Knesset whom Ben-Gurion and the whole of the
government knew well. The soldiers’ captivity dragged on until they were
finally returned to Israel in March 1956. By then, however, Uri Ilan had hanged
himself. He managed to hide a note into his uniform. It was found when the
body was being prepared for burial. It read: Lo bagadeti. Nekamah. “I did not
betray anything. Revenge.”

Ever since the Uri Ilan mission, there had been a de facto ban on cross-
border intelligence operations by Israeli soldiers. Ben-Gurion and his military
commanders knew, of course, the importance of getting early warning of an
enemy attack. But they decided the price of possible failure was simply too
high.

Sayeret Matkal was born three years later. Avraham was still part of the unit
running low-level agents in Syria and Lebanon, but his commander reluctantly
agreed to allow him to set up his new intelligence group. His initial
“headquarters” was a sparsely furnished Tel Aviv apartment. The first people he
brought in were veterans of the Palmach’s Arab Platoon, pre-state fighters who
trained themselves to pass as Arabs and gather intelligence, or stage raids,
behind enemy lines. Next, he invited friends who had served in Unit 101 and
Company A. Finally, he enlisted a core of them to help train recruits to his new
sayeret. He hoped the involvement of these commando veterans would also give
the unit credibility inside the kirya. One of them, Micha Kapusta, had been part
of 101, as had Itzhak Gibli, who had been a teenage Palmachnik in 1948. A
third was another Company A officer named Aharon Eshel, known as Errol, in
part for his undeniably Errol Flynn-like swagger, but also an acronym of his
Hebrew name. But the crowing addition to the group had the distinction of
having led the last successful Israeli bugging mission on the Golan, in addition
to being the most respected commando in Israel, a man who Dayan would later
call the country’s greatest soldier. It was Meir Har-Zion himself.

* * *

I was part of the second group of recruits to Sayeret Matkal, in the early
summer of 1960. The unit had been given its own base barely a year earlier. Bu
it had yet to carry out a single mission, and there was no sign of that happening.
Avraham couldn’t be sure when, or if, the generals in the kirya might give him

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