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Chapter Five

Almost no one in Israel knew what we had done. But the next morning, a package arrived at the Sayeret Matkal base from one of the few people who did. We opened it in Avraham’s office. It was a nearly full carton of champagne: real, French champagne, since it would be years before Israel’s embryonic wine industry produced anything similar. Inside was a note from the chief of staff. “For the success of the operation,” General Tzur had written. “Minus two bottles… to teach Ehud Brog not to shut off his field radio.”

I assumed that his reprimand was tongue-in-cheek, for the same reason I’d escaped being locked up on General Yoffe’s orders as a gasoline thief. Had we been captured on the Golan, the very future of the sayeret as an operational intelligence unit would have been put at risk. Tzur, and Ben-Gurion as well, would have faced a reopening of all the old wounds from the Uri Ilan mission. But not only had we managed to get in and out of Syria in one piece. We had taken at least a first step toward erasing the blind spot in our intelligence capabilities shown up so dramatically by Rotem. A few days later, I received a letter from the chief of staff informing me that I was to receive my first tzalash, or operational decoration, in recognition of “a mission which contributed to the security of the state of Israel.”

My own feelings were more mixed. I was proud of what I, and my team, had accomplished. On a personal level, too, I felt I’d reached an important landmark on my unlikely journey from the winter morning when I’d arrived as physically frail, awkward kibbutz teenager at APC boot camp in the Negev; through my years of sayeret training under the strict, sometimes sardonic, but always supportive gaze of Israel’s most storied commandos; to, now, having begun to make a real contribution to Avraham’s vision of a new kind of Israeli military unit. But while Avraham, General Tzur and our other military and intelligence chiefs celebrated our mission, I felt not so much triumph as relief. I didn’t kid myself: I knew that the operation could just as easily have gone wrong. In fact, it very nearly did, through errors or omissions I had made. I made that point, in general terms, when we joined Avraham and the rest of the sayeret in a formal debriefing. But that very night, just as I had in the days before we set off, I wrote down in detail some of the oversights I knew I’d have to correct if we were to succeed in further missions.

Why hadn’t I chosen a route that took us further away from the Syrian base at Banias? How had I let us arrive so unprepared, untrained and unequipped for

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