by Moshe Betser
“I do not want to lower my combat-fitness profile,” I insisted. The last thing I wanted was for the IDF doctors to decide I was no longer fit for combat anymore. “I’m not taking money if it means lowering my profile.”
I still did not know if I wanted to go back to the army full-time. But I wanted reserve duty in a combat unit. If they lowered my profile, it meant reserves behind a desk. Nothing was worse.
“There’s no connection between the two,” my friend promised. The disability forms go to the Defense Ministry, not the army, he said. “There’s no connection.”
But I do not trust bureaucracies. I ignored the letter the army sent asking me to appear in front of a medical panel. I ignored a second letter as well. So when I ignored the third summons, they closed the file, never changing my medical records. As far as the big, official army knew, I never caught the bullet at Karameh.
At home, Nurit had her hands full with our year-old baby boy, Shaul, and nursing me back to health. I began working on the farm, regaining my strength. I started by gardening in the shade of the two palm trees that stood at the entrance to our garden. At first I tired quickly. But nonetheless, I worked every day, learning to recognize my new face after the plastic surgery that repaired the lower half of my face. It widened my jaw slightly, just enough to surprise me the first few times I caught a glance of myself in the mirror.
By summer, the jaundice faded to a memory while I reached full strength, able to toss bales like in the old days. As strong as ever, I handled all the jobs on the farm.
Life was good. Shaul crawled freely in the backyard, which led to a barn and a chicken coop, just like at my grandparents’. Nurit was happy. We looked forward to a good harvest in the fall.
But I began itching to get back to the action. The Six-Day War did not put an end to Arab refusal to let us live in peace. The Jordanians lost control on their side of the border in the Jordan Rift, especially after Karameh, when we failed to nip the PLO in the bud.
Now, the PLO ran the Jordan Rift on the Jordanian side of the Jordan River and Nahal Arava south of the Dead Sea. Another kind of war of attrition raged in the Jordan Rift. Instead of the artillery and snipers firing across the Suez Canal on the Egyptian front, nightly hunts for armed infiltrators making their way over the Jordan River lit up the sky with flares. It meant action for a sayeret. A lot of action. And I missed it.
I kept in touch with the unit. My brother had replaced me as the sayeret’s deputy commander, so he brought stories, as did friends who came to visit. But I did not need any stories to know what I missed: the cool nights under the stars, alert to all the nature of the desert, aware of its harmony, and listening for the enemy’s arrival, the sound that disrupted the quiet. I missed keeping my eye on the tracks, I missed watching the horizon, I missed leading my soldiers into position for attack, and I missed outwitting the enemy. But most of all, I felt absurd, worrying about harvests while my friends fought.
Then, in July 1968, the Arabs surprised us with a new form of warfare — state-supported terror. They grabbed an El Al plane heading to Tel Aviv out of Rome, forcing the pilot to take it to Algeria. The Algerian government welcomed the hijackers as heroes. Our citizens sat helpless in Algerian hands for more than two weeks. In the end, Jerusalem gave in to the terrorists’ demands, releasing Palestinian prisoners, captured and tried for terrorism, in exchange for the hostages field by the Algerians.
Disgusted by the tactic of attacking innocent civilians, it appalled me, indeed shocked me, that the government gave into the terrorists’ demands. I asked friends from the security services why El Al did not have an appropriate security mechanism to prevent hijackings. “We’re working on it,” they promised.
“As soon as you have something, let me know,” I asked. I wanted in on that action.
In January of 1969, I received a letter at home. Only two lines long, but embossed with the seal of the state, it asked me to attend an interview at an office in Tel Aviv not far from the defense ministry.
They knew nothing about my injury, but the scar on my throat still blazed red. I told them what had happened — they said it should not be a hindrance to taking the course, which started in another month.
But two weeks later, a phone call woke me at home in the middle of the night. “There’s been another attack on an El Al plane,” said the voice. “We’re moving up the schedule. We start training tomorrow.”
* * *
“Who here has ever used a pistol?” The old man in the front of the classroom spoke Hebrew with a thick American accent that made me want to smile. A few of the fellows around me grinned, raising their hands. Though I did know about pistols, something in his voice made me keep my hand down. I’m glad I did.
“None of you know shit,” he snarled at us. “What do you guys know about it? Have you ever walked down Amsterdam Ave. at two in the morning and have somebody pull a blade on you?” Out of nowhere, it seemed, a Beretta appeared in his hand, cocked and ready to fire. “Call me Dave,” he said, beginning a three-week immersion in the use of a Beretta in close quarters.
His Hebrew was so bad it became infectious. By the end of the first week, the dozen of us he did not throw out — with a tear in his eye, because he wanted us all to pass, but “if you can’t cut it, I got to cut you”—all spoke Hebrew with the flat r’s and l’s of his funny accent.
A master of the handgun, Dave covered all aspects of hand-to-hand combat in tight quarters, emphasizing accuracy. “The idea is to hit the terrorist, not the airplane,” he pointed out over and over again with a shake of his head, making us repeat every move until we got it right.
He chose the .22 Beretta as the weapon for the job because the small caliber, combined with the low bullet velocity, would be less dangerous in the confines of an airplane, where a punctured window means disaster at 35,000 feet inside a pressurized cabin.
However, the relative weakness of the Beretta meant that two shots would probably be necessary to stop an enemy. Dave called it the “bang-bang.” We worked with moving targets, inside a cabin mock-up, until we knew all the moves Dave taught-and new ones we invented as we learned.
We learned every commercial passenger plane, from El Al’s small fleet to all the other commercial lines that flew into Israel. The Arabs made no secret of their plans to hijack more planes. But we kept our plans secret.
Boarding the plane like regular passengers, wearing business suits or sport jackets with ties, we carried an attaché case or carry-on bag as part of our disguise as innocent business travelers.
Usually, intelligence reports indicated whether a flight might be a likely target because of VIPs on board — or potentially suspicious passengers, like Arabs, or students from countries in the West or Japan, where the PLO made strong inroads in far-leftist circles.
Our strategically located seats gave us views of the entire cabin. As soon as the plane took off, we used the opportunity to move down the aisle, matching faces to the names on the passenger list. When the plane landed we disembarked just like regular passengers.
Suddenly, cities like Paris, London, and New York became routine for me, a farm boy in the great big world. But I never made it to the right place.
Terrorists grabbed an El Al plane on the tarmac at Zurich, killing the pilot, Yoram Peres, from Ma’ayan Zvi. One of my friends from Dave’s course, Mordechai Rahamim, managed to stop the terrorist. The Swiss police arrested Rahamim, blowing our cover.
A few weeks later, I was in New York on the job when terrorists hijacked an El Al plane leaving Amsterdam. One of our marshals screwed that one up. He knew the pilot from home, and the terrorists struck while he visited his friend in the cockpit.
A firefight broke out, ending with a dead terrorist and two wounded — a terrorist woman named Leila Haled, and one of the El Al stewards. The British arrested the terrorists. Haled, a black-haired beauty, quickly became the darling of the British tabloids, a celebrity for the radical new left. Tried and convicted, she did not spend m
uch time in jail. The British, like every other European country, preferred to negotiate with terrorists. When the PLO hijacked a British plane demanding Haled’s release, London gave in. They never did that with the Irish Republican Army’s terrorists, not comprehending that terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon, and that only a united front can beat it.
In Munich, I missed another attack on a bus carrying El Al passengers from the terminal to the plane. Uri Cohen, the pilot, fought off one of the terrorists, making him drop one of his grenades, which exploded and killed the terrorist.
I spent a year and a half on the road, every week in a different city, and not once did I see any action. But once, right after takeoff from Paris, I came very close to putting into practice what Dave taught so well.
Nothing in the intelligence report that morning said anything about an Arab on board. But while the plane still climbed, the NO SMOKING and SEAT BELT signs still flashing, I sensed movement behind my seat, which was in a strategic position near the cockpit door.
Turning, I saw a young man in a suit, with the swarthy complexion of an Arab. He stood in the passageway between the first class and tourist sections of the Boeing. I looked around for the stewardess to shoo him back to his seat, but she disappeared into the kitchen right after takeoff.
I reached into my jacket, touching the gun in the custom-fit holster beneath my left armpit. The suspect stood by the curtain, looking in the direction of the cockpit door. If I spoke to him, it would break my cover. I tensed, ready to draw and give him the “bang-bang,” as Dave called the two-shot move. The cockpit door flung open — something that never should happen during takeoff — and the steward came out, taking a seat beside the cockpit door. I pulled the gun out of the holster far enough to get my finger into the trigger guard.
The suspected terrorist took a step forward, brushing aside the curtain between the two cabins. I pulled the gun another few inches out of its holster, ready to swing and aim if the suspect made one more move.
Just then, the stewardess came out of the kitchen. “What are you doing?” she asked my suspect. “Don’t you see the SEAT BELT sign?”
“I needed the toilet,” said the young man sheepishly.
“You’re from tourist section,” the stewardess brusquely told him. “Back there,” she added, pointing toward the rear of the plane.
That wayward traveler never knew how close he came to dying. But an American tourist sitting across the aisle from me watched the whole thing. He grinned at me, raising a thumb in a gesture of approval before going back to his magazine.
After Mordechai Rahamim killed the terrorist in Zurich, the whole world knew that El Al planes carried armed marshals. It put the Swiss in an uncomfortable position, to arrest Mordechai and put him on trial. Afterward, they let him go — but the public revelation of our work made it even more difficult. Suddenly, the national sport of traveling Israelis became trying to pick us out in the crowd. We were trained to ignore the staring and never to respond to the guesses. If passengers tried to fraternize, we brushed them off with a smile or a frown but did not get involved in conversations. In the air, we needed to remain alert at all times.
Of course, wherever we landed, we came under the scrutiny of law enforcement agencies and secret intelligence services. With most of the European countries quiet agreements for cooperation prevailed. But Americans are particularly zealous about armed foreign agents on their soil. And our cover as businessmen could not succeed for long — how many twenty-four- or twenty-five-year-old businessmen travel in and out of international airports without any luggage for stays of two or three days at most?
But after the incident in Zurich, when Mordechai Rahamim pulled out his gun, our operators decided that the best policy vis-à-vis the Americans would be telling the truth.
By then, my trips to Manhattan were routine. No questions at customs. Cab to the hotel, rest, and some sightseeing for the two or three day layover before making the trip back in the other direction.
My next flight into Manhattan came a week or so after the Zurich incident. I went through passport control without any problems. But as I moved into the arrivals terminal, a black guy approached me and flashed something shiny at me. A peddler? I thought. “No thanks,” I said, walking past.
“What do you mean ‘no thanks,’” the man snapped, slapping a hand on my shoulder. “FBI.”
My English is not very good — just good enough to identify myself as a businessman, tell a taxi driver an address, and ask for steak, salad, and potatoes at a restaurant. But even in Nahalal we had seen Hollywood movies. I understood “FBI.”
“You come with me,” he said, holding my arm and leading me to a side room. Three American special agents waited to question me. “Empty your pockets,” said the black agent.
I pulled out a short club from under my jacket and a canister of Mace from a pocket. “I am security for El Al,” I admitted, just as our operators back home had instructed us after the Zurich incident.
Until then, we had denied any connection to El Al security. The Americans suspected us, but never knew for sure. But Zurich changed everything. The agents fell speechless. Indeed, for a moment I thought they did not understand my bad English with its thick Hebrew accent. I repeated myself. “Yes, I am El Al security,” I said to their astonished faces.
Until that moment they had treated me with a sullen, brusque attitude. Suddenly, they turned respectful, full of questions and curiosity. They wanted to know about my training and my military background. I did not understand everything they asked. But I also had my instructions: I could admit to being an El Al security officer — nothing more.
They made some phone calls — to Washington, I guess — and a little while later let me go.
“Have a good time in New York,” said the black federal agent whom I first mistook for a petty thief. He slapped me on the back like an old friend. “And stay out of trouble,” he said as we parted, not realizing that I had been looking for trouble for eighteen months — and never found it in the air marshal job.
In fact, the job bored me. The excitement of foreign cities wore off quickly. Cities are stifling, noisy places that hold little magic for me. Three days home, then three days on the road, made it even worse.
But then I flew to Africa.
The first time I landed in Nairobi, I teamed up with another air marshal for a four-day trip into the nature reserves of Kenya and Tanzania. A hundred trips to New York, London, and Paris paled compared to four days in the African bush.
Everything enchanted me. It was a totally different world, where nature dominated everything. Africa spoke to me in ways that America or Europe never could. I loved the colors and smells, the dignified way people carried themselves in the villages and even in the city. I loved the dark brown soil and its mysterious fruits and vegetables. I loved the wild herds and flocks in the game reserves, themselves much larger than all of Israel. I loved everything about the place.
I already knew a little about Africa. At sixteen, just as our romance began to blossom, Nurit moved to Tanzania when her father joined the military delegation there. For six months we corresponded weekly, until she and her younger brother came home, wanting to finish high school in Israel. Back in Israel, Nurit became as excited as me about finding a way to return to Africa, together.
Almost every African country, except for the Arab nations of North Africa, wanted an Israeli military legation to train army units. Brigadier General Yitzhak Bar-On commanded the special unit inside Military Intelligence specializing in foreign aid. I was only a lieutenant, and a reservist at that, so it took a bit of chutzpah for me to call a brigadier in Tel Aviv to ask for an appointment.
We met in a nondescript office building not far from the defense ministry compound in downtown Tel Aviv, and I told him about my background and how Africa appealed to me. He said very little, and the short meeting came to an end. “If there’s something to talk about,” he told me, “we’ll call you.”
That
weekend I flew to Rome, one of my last trips for El Al. The whole trip I wondered if I would ever hear from Bar-On again. But when I returned home Nurit’s first news was that the brigadier’s office had called.
“I checked you out,” he said when I phoned him back, “and we have things to talk about.”
“I’m ready,” I said eagerly.
“We need young people, and especially paratroopers,” he explained. “For a particular African country.”
“That’s me,” I jumped in.
“But there’s one problem,” he said ominously, pausing before adding, “You’ll have to go to school. For a course,” he said. “You need to learn English. And African geography and culture, and …” I figured he had looked into my background all the way back to high school, where I had never found much enthusiasm for academics.
“No problem,” I interrupted. “I can do that, if it means getting to Africa.”
“And the course will not start for a few months,” he added, probably worried that my youth made me impatient.
But as a farmer — and as an officer who had spent many a night waiting for an ambush to work — I knew patience as both tactic and strategy. And I had a strategy.
As I left his office that morning, I realized that I knew a perfect solution to fill at least part of the time before I went back to school to learn English and about Africa. There was a forty-day company commanders’ course starting in the fall. Because I was automatically eligible as a deputy commander of a sayeret, the course would give me captain’s bars and make me even more valuable to Bar-On’s military missions to Africa.
So, in September 1970, I hung up my El Al Beretta .22 and began the course at a West Bank training base near Shechem, the biblical city the Arabs call Nablus. It covered theoretical and practical elements of running a company. My experience of the Six-Day War with Shaked, when my platoon grew to company size with all the reservists, made much of the material familiar to me.
