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cable, install the machinery, cover our tracks and get back into Israel again undetected. Even if we managed to avoid getting captured, without completely camouflaging what we’d done, the Egyptians would discover what we had done, almost certainly tipping off Syria as well to our bugging operations on the Golan Heights.

The difficulties with a Sinai operation weren’t just theoretical. Almost a year before leading the first mission on the Golan, I’d actually been involved in preliminary planning, and fairly detailed training, for such a mission in the Sinai. We’d ended up abandoning the idea as obviously unworkable.

But Meir Amit, not just our unit’s overall commander in the kirya but Chief of Operations during Rotem, recognized that getting intelligence access to Egypt was central to Israeli security. He was intent on reviving the plan to tap into Nasser’s communications in the Sinai. So was Avraham Arnan. He enlisted the backing of an old friend, Uri Yarom, who was now commander of the Israeli Air Force and was eager to put our fleet of recently acquired Sikorsky S-58 helicopters to operational use. When Avraham called me in to tell me what he had in mind, he began by saying it would be “by far the greatest challenge we’ve contemplated” – typically disarming candor, but also a challenge which I’m pretty sure he knew would only increase my determination to at least try. The flight in would be difficult enough. Israel had never before tried such a heliborne mission. But he told me that wasn’t my problem. “That will be Uri’s job.” The really testing part would be to carry out an mission, at night, deep inside Egypt, cover our tracks and get out again in one piece. “Still, I’m sure that we can succeed,” he said. “And I want you and your team to do it.”

Even now, more than half-a-century later, some of the details of how we planned to tap into the Egyptians’ communications remain classified. But once I’d chosen my team of sayeret soldiers for the mission, we trained for nearly nine months. We drafted in geologists to identify areas of the Negev similar to the terrain we’d find in the Sinai. We developed a series of methods to prevent Egyptian soldiers or scouts from discovering that we’d been there – assuming, of course, we managed to get in, attach the intercept, and return safely. It was a relentless process of trial… and error.

One of the many reasons we’d abandoned the plan a couple of years earlier was that, in a nighttime exercise to see whether we could avoid detection by Israel’s own crack desert scouts, we’d failed utterly. Now, after many weeks of training in the Negev, we did, finally, succeed – in a test running for four

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