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During the exercise, Meir said nothing at all. I couldn’t help wondering whether, despite our nearly daily exercises, and my nightly stock-taking, I’d somehow missed an obvious detail in our planning. When we got back to the sayeret base, Avraham was waiting for us. “Well?” he asked Meir. “They don’t need me,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.” It was not just a source of reassurance for me, but a huge relief for Avraham.

The team I’d inherited from Tubul included three gifted soldiers with different backgrounds, and different skills. Motti Nagar was born in Cairo. He was short but solidly built, smart, level-headed and almost always smiling. Kuti Sharabi grew up in a Yemeni family in an impoverished neighborhood in Tel Aviv. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, a quick mind and sometimes even quicker tongue, but an extraordinary ability to focus on the task at hand. The third member was a kibbutznik. His name was Moshe Elimelech. We called him Moshiko. Utterly self-contained, a man who spoke only when absolutely necessary, he also brought two different qualities to the mission. One was going to be indispensable: an almost squirrel-like ability to climb trees. Or telephone poles. The other, of which I was a bit more leery, was a total, deeply irrational, absence of fear.

Though none of us needed a further reminder of the weight being attached to our mission, the night before we headed north, Avraham got a call from the chief-of- staff’s office. Tzvi Tzur wanted to see me the next morning for a personal briefing. I tried to get Avraham to say no. I pointed out that if we didn’t get going by ten o’clock at the latest, we’d risk throwing everything off schedule. But “no” was not an option. After some further back-and-forth, it was agreed that I would meet the commander of Israel’s armed forces at nine the next morning at a gas station north of Tel Aviv and join him for the 20-minute drive along the coastal road to a speaking engagement he had in Netanya.

I saw Avraham again before I set off. “We are beginning an extremely critical 24 hours for our unit, the intelligence corps, in fact for the armed forces as a whole,” he told me. “I don’t know what might happen. No one does. Just remember two things. First, out there, in the field, you are the ramatkal” – the chief of staff. He told me that only I and my team could judge and respond to what we encountered once the operation started. “And second, this mission has to be accomplished.”

I left see the real ramatkal. Before we began the drive to Netanya, he asked me to unfold the map I’d brought with me and talk him through, step by step, how we planned to get onto the Golan, plant the bugging device, and get back

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