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anything but under control. Within days, he bowed to political pressure and brought back Moshe Dayan, now a member of the Knesset, as Defense Minister.

I still vividly remember a visitor to the sayeret the day after Eshkol’s address. Colonel Eli Zeira was head of the “collection department” of the intelligence corps, the rough equivalent of America’s National Security Agency. Formally, Sayeret Matkal was part of his department. He called together all the officers. He said that there had so far been three periods in the Zionist project. The first was from the early settlements in Palestine at the end of the 19th century until the establishment of Israel in 1948. The second, from 1948 until the 1956 War. The third from 1956 until now. Then he said: “There will soon be a war. Three Arab countries will take part. Within a week, we will defeat all of them. And a new chapter in the history of Zionism will begin.”

The Six-Day War began on June 5, 1967. As Eli Zeira so confidently predicted, not just Egypt and Syria, but Jordan, too, joined forces against us. And it was indeed all over within a week. The final outcome – Israel’s victory – was sealed by noon on the first day, with wave after wave of pre-emptive bombing sorties destroying the entire air force of all three Arab countries. But the fighting which followed was brutal in places: especially around Jerusalem, but also in the south at the outset of the war, and later on the Golan Heights.

The first effect back in Israel of our air force attacks was to make our sayeret helicopter missions into the Sinai suddenly superfluous. In fact, it left the entire unit at loose ends – especially veterans or reservists like me who had been part of our nearly decade-long development into Israel’s sole, dedicated cross-border infiltration force. At this point, we were still just an intelligence unit, not an elite commando force like Britain’s SAS, Avraham Aranan’s ultimate vision for the sayeret. The aim of our bugging missions into Syria and Egypt was not to fight. It was to get in and get out, unseen and undetected. But we were not only equipped to fight if necessary. From the unit’s earliest days under the sway of Meir Har-Zion, Kapusta and Gibli and Errol and the other grizzled vets from Unit 101 and Company A, we had been steeped in the spirit of commandos. Our training was the most rigorous in the Israeli armed forces, involving not just a punishing endurance régime but learning to assemble and disassemble, fire and detonate, everything from handguns to machine guns, makeshift explosives to grenades and landmines.

The frustration we felt on the first morning of the war was not because we were itching to fight, for the hell of it. One hallmark of the sayeret’s ethos, especially once the unit did start to evolve into a full-fledged commando unit,

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