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we’d left the hangar. “If they realize we’re there, we get into the cabin as
quickly as possible, any way we can. The first five seconds will ne critical. Act
decisively,” I told the men. “Assume that everyone else will be doing the same.
Trust your instincts. You are trained for this.”

But more than an hour passed as we waited for the green light to storm the
plane. My main concern wasn’t that the hijackers would see us. There seemed
little reason to believe one of them would suddenly decide to take a walk in the
middle of the night. But sunrise was around five in the morning, and there was
no way I could see mounting our assault in broad daylight. If we didn’t get the
go-ahead soon, the chance would be lost. I called Talik several times, making
the point that if we were going to do it, we needed to use darkness as an ally.
The sayeret was a breed of night animals. Other people, even terrorists, would
be less alert and effective at night. But he kept saying he needed more time.

Finally, an hour before sunrise, he called back. “The big boss is on his way,”
he said. I left the others and crept back to meet the Defense Minister, a good
eighty yards from the plane. Dayan greeted me with a whispered hello. In a
way, his arrival reminded me of my first operation in the sayeret when, before
heading north to the Golan, I’d been summoned to brief Tzvi Tzur, the chief of
staff. Tzur had seemed less interested in the details than in confirming that I was
confident the mission would work. Dayan, of course, had as much operational
knowledge and experience as anyone in Israel. Yet it seemed to me that he, too,
wanted to satisfy himself that I honestly felt we were in a position to succeed.
Especially, though he never so much as hinted at this, because two of the
officers I would be taking in with me, Uzi and Mookie Betzer, were members of
his family.

“How do you plan to do it?” he asked. I explained how we would get into the
plane simultaneously, in four teams, and confront the hijackers. I said I was
confident we’d succeed, especially since darkness gave us an element of
surprise, and the terrorists were bound to be tiring. “We can do it,” I said.
“Better now than in daytime.” Dayan merely nodded. He stood there, silent, for
another few moments. “I’ll let you know,” he said, then shook my hand and
returned to the control tower. But fifteen minutes later he sent his reply, via
Talik. It was brief and explicit: “Not tonight.”

For the first but not the last time in uniform, I felt the frustration of finding
my preparation and judgement trumped, without explanation, by a decision
from above. When I got back to the control tower, I made no attempt to hide my
view we should have moved against the hijackers while we had the chance. But

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