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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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