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Chapter Four

At first, it was only “approval in principle”. It’s impossible to overstate the trepidation with which Israel’s military brass, and Ben-Gurion himself, approached the decision finally to send Sayeret Matkal into action. It was not just the fact that we were a unit uttterly untested in the field. The stakes in the mission we were contemplating were enormous. For the first time since Uri Ilan’s deseperate act of suicide in a Damascus jail cell, Israeli soldiers would be crossing into Arab territory on an intelligence mission. Amid continuing tensions with the increasingly militant rulers of Egypt and Syria, there seemed little doubt that at some stage we would again have to fight to defend our security, perhaps even our existence as a state. The Rotem debacle had highlighted the danger of a surprise attack, potentially leaving us in a scramble to call up reserve units as Syrian or Egyptian tanks advanced on our borders. But the memory of Uri Ilan remained a haunting reminder of the risks of failure.

My role, again, came down partly to accident. The man initially chosen to lead the operation was someone I’d liked from my first days in the sayeret. Ya’akov Tal, known as Tubul, was a year older than me. He came from Tiberias in the north of Israel. As a teenager, he’d worked for extra pocket money alongside shepherds in the hills above the Sea of Galilee, picking up a near-fluent command of Arabic. He was self-confident without a trace of arrogance, with a natural talent for connecting with his soldiers. In my case, there was a further bond: a shared fascination with math and sciences.

But Tubul had applied to the leading technology institute in Israel, the Technion near Haifa. As he began training his four-man team to cross onto Syria’s Golan Heights, he received word that he’d been accepted. The academic year wouldn’t begin until September, and it had been assumed at first that the operation would happen before then. But even though Meir Amit was pressing the rest of the military brass for a final go-ahead, it still hadn’t arrived by early August. Avraham decided he needed a fall-back plan. He called Tubul and me into his office. He said he wanted me to join the team’s training as Tubul’s deputy, and to be ready to step in as commander if that proved necessary. When we next heard from Amit, a week later, it became clear the mission would not happen in time for Tubul to lead it.

We would be setting out from the northeast corner of Israel, a patch of parkland near a kibbutz called Dan, only a mile or so from where Uri Ilan’s group had begun its mission. This time, however, the target was more

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