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Chapter Seventeen

It was an ambush. It came in July 1995, six months after I’d left the army and only days before I was expected to named as Interior Minister in Yitzhak Rabin’s government. The effect, and clearly the intention, was to threaten my political career before it had even begun – by reviving, and lying about, the tragic training accident at the Negev army base of Tze’elim, during our preparations for the operation against Saddam Hussein.

When the “story” broke, I was nearly five thousand miles away. I was accompanying Nava’s brother, Doron Cohen, on a business trip he was making to China – and savoring my last few days as a private citizen between my three decades of military service and my entry into politics. I’d got a hint of the storm that was about to engulf me a few days before we left for the Far East. It was a letter from a reporter at Yeidot Achronot, Israel’s largest-selling newspaper, with a list of questions about Tze’elim. The thrust of the questions made clear the case Yediot seemed intent on building: that after the live missile strike which killed the Sayeret Matkal men, I had abandoned the injured and immediately “fled” to Tel Aviv. I probably should have answered the letter. But I assumed even rudimentary checks would reveal the story to be false. I’d had similar questions from a TV journalist a few months earlier. I did phone him back. I explained the true details of what had happened. I suggested he talk to others who were there, like Amnon Lipkin, the current chief of staff and my former deputy, to confirm my account. The story was dropped.

But Yediot evidently decided not to let the facts get in the way of the “exclusive” it ran in its weekend edition on July 7. Under a banner headline – an undeniably clever Hebrew pun, Ehud Barakh, “Ehud Ran Away” – it accused me of having stood by, paralyzed with shock, when the missiles struck and then, as other officers tended to the wounded, rushed away by helicopter.

Doron and I were having dinner in Beijing when Nava phoned. She’d just seen the newspaper story, and read it to me. I’d never been angrier. As best I could work out, it had been concocted from a patchwork of accounts long after the fact. To the extent the notion of my “fleeing” had been raised, I could only imagine that Yediot’s “sources” had misunderstood the arrival of the first medical helicopter, when the pilot was unable to see us and flew on before returning a couple of minutes later. But in every single detail about my actions after the tragedy occurred, it was a pure and simple lie.

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