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The intellectual experience at university everything I hoped. The challenge was finding a way to juggle my studies with my military reserve duty. In other units, most reservists could schedule their one month per year when classes weren’t in session. To be of use to Sayeret Matkal, I’d have to report when I was most needed, and four weeks was unlikely to be enough. Near the end of my first term, from late 1965 into the new year, I was called to participate in our latest mission into the Sinai. The next winter, and through early 1967, I was called up for another mission and was away for nearly two months.

That operation was prompted by the fact the Egyptians had begun laying a new communications cable, parallel to the one where we’d put our intercepts.

With the diggers getting closer to where I’d led the first Sinai mission, the kirya was worried that they might unearth the apparatus we’d installed. In theory, at least, we’d planned for that. The bugging unit which we buried included a booby-trap explosive device. Still, nearly four years on, we couldn’t be absolutely sure it would work. So the decision was taken to send the sayeret back on a further night crossing into the Sinai, defuse the explosives, and bring the whole thing back to Israel. Since I was the one who’d installed it, I was given the job of removing it.

The officer in overall command of the mission was Nechemia Cohen. He was a good friend, and one of the finest officers in the unit. Before I left for university, I’d mentored him so that he could take over my role as the effective number-two officer in the sayeret, in charge of all our core operational activities. He, too, was now about to leave, though not to for university. He was becoming deputy commander of a paratroop company, under another former Sayeret Matkal, named Yechiel Amsalem.

I was meant to defuse the booby-trap remotely: with a 12-foot-long metal tool designed by the technology unit. I was fairly confident I’d manage. But when Chief-of-Staff Rabin heard about the operation, he summoned me, along with Eliezer Gonn, the scientist working with us on the plan to defuse the booby-trap. Rabin was with a half-dozen other officers when we arrived. Gonn had brought along a mock-up of the explosive device, which he proceeded to place on Rabin’s office table. But as I took out the extension tool and started to explain how I was going to defuse the device, Rabin turned to Gonn and asked: “Could it blow up spontaneously?”

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