Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando

by Moshe Betser

  We gave them an intensive three-week course, a condensed version of what we give our own paratroops recruits: topography, navigation, raids, helicopter-borne raids, parachuting, and working with air support. We began at five in the morning with calisthenics and worked into the night, with three short breaks for food. We treated them like recruits, not generals, colonels, or majors. Everyone did everything. They seemed to love it.

  We took them into the hills of Samaria, north of the West Bank town of Nablus, running them through maneuvers that led up to an offensive deployment that included helicopter-borne assaults and parachute raids. We took them to the Golan, where we did house-to-house combat exercises in the abandoned Syrian town of Kuneitra. As usually happens in a course, when the trainers and trainees are working hard and having a good time, a real camaraderie developed amongst us, irrespective of rank.

  Only when I reached Uganda, a few weeks after the course, did I realize how strange it must have been to them. In Uganda, company commanders were issued a Mercedes with a driver. Staff headquarters for a brigade commander looked like a palace to me, with white-gloved guards standing all day long at attention. Only then did I realize that just as exotic as their army appeared to me, so must ours have appeared to them.

  With their British training, discipline of the ranks meant more than anything else. The rote and ritual of military traditions seemed more important than any other aspect of service. A Ugandan company commander snapped to attention when a battalion commander stepped into view. It made no difference whether the battalion commander noticed — only when the senior officer either gave the order to go to ease or disappeared did the junior officer relax.

  The Ugandan Army kept tremendous distance between its ranks. Officers in the Ugandan Army had chauffeurs, personal guards, and servants, something completely foreign to someone who grew up on a moshav, with a strong ideological commitment to respect for work and the equality of people. In the IDF officers eat with their troops, and while distance always exists between a commander and his soldiers, the intimacy of friendship, especially in a special forces unit, overrides the traditional formalities of the military.

  One day at Entebbe airport to pick up supplies from Israel, I bumped into one of the battalion commanders we had trained back home. I could not resist asking him whether he felt slighted about our treatment of them during the three-week course. “Here you’re gods, but the way we treated you there …” I began, curious about his feelings during those three weeks when we made his life miserable.

  His answer surprised me. “It was wonderful.” He beamed. “One of the greatest experiences in my whole life.”

  But the greatest shock to me on arrival in Uganda came with the house. A family of servants lived in a shack straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at the far end of the large backyard.

  In the IDF, officers are not allowed to use soldiers for personal chores. Nobody ever polished my boots. But suddenly in Africa, servants kept my uniforms pressed and my boots shined. They would not let Nurit or me lift a finger to take care of the house. Told to pay the whole family fifty shillings a month, barely a week’s wages in Israel, I immediately tripled their pay.

  It made me a hero to the servants of the neighborhood and a villain in the eyes of the British colonialists who still lived there. One day in the butcher shop, the price of a steak seemed far too low. I field out twice the amount the butcher asked for. A British woman behind me in line started shouting at me. “You Israelis are spoiling them! You’re ruining them for us!” she shrieked at me, turning red in the face with exasperation. I laughed, gave the butcher a wink as I took my meat, and left the money for him on the counter.

  The house came with an acre and a half of land, exquisitely gardened by one of the servants, a teenager from the family. I wanted to work in the gorgeous garden. As a farmer, I loved the way the African land’s fertility and the sky’s abundant rain made everything grow so quickly. But when I asked the gardener where to find the lawn mower, he became very agitated.

  Finally, Nurit came out of the house. With English much better than mine and experience with servants from her six months in Tanzania, she finally understood the problem. “He says he takes care of the lawn and it is not right for you, as the master of the house, to do the work.” My grandfather must have turned in his grave. It took some explaining, but finally they agreed to let me work in the garden whenever I wanted.

  The luxuries that came with the job went beyond the fancy house. They gave me money to buy a car-that became the moment when I finally realized exactly how far from Israel I had traveled. I bought a brand-new Peugeot 404, a car that cost a fortune in Israel, far beyond my means.

  Jinja sits on the banks of the White Nile, about eighty kilometers north of Kampala, the Ugandan capital. The countryside is green, lush, wet-everything Israel is not. I made it my habit, every morning on the road to the army base, to stop to admire the view of the lake, constantly astounded that our entire country could fit into a corner of the massive body of fresh water.

  The weather, too, astonished me. The sky turns red in minutes, and then suddenly rain, thunder, and lightning swallow everything up for an hour, two, or three. It felt like the world breaking up around me. Terrifyingly close, bolts of lightning filled half the sky, and thunder shook the ground. Then the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had started. Until I reached Jinja, I had never experienced warm rain. In the Galilee, rain comes in winter and is always cold. In Uganda, we only knew heat and humidity. At home, we count every millimeter. In Uganda, they count the rainfall by centimeters.

  After I saw the rain the first time, I understood why my house needed a full-time gardener. You pruned a tree and used one of the branches as a sapling, just sticking it in the ground and letting nature take over. Theodor Herzl, the Austrian journalist who founded modern Zionism, once suggested making a deal with the British empire to turn Uganda into the Jewish homeland. Now, in Uganda, I wondered about the wisdom of the Zionist movement’s decision to reject the Uganda plan. In Uganda, farming would have been a lot easier than in the Middle East.

  I spent the first three days in Jinja getting organized, and then, ready to work, I went to the army base. My arrival made the other Israelis — and the African officers who served on my staff — very nervous.

  “This is not Israel,” said Itzik Bar-Akiva, the senior Israeli officer in Jinja. “Here you can take your time. They gave you ten days to get organized. Use them.”

  “I’m organized. I’m ready to go to work,” I said.

  “Please, Muki,” said Bar-Akiva. “Slow down, take it easier.”

  I realized they worried my pace would force them to change theirs. But I could not sit around twiddling my thumbs. I let two more days pass and then called my staff officers to a meeting. They lined up at attention in front of me, like new recruits in front of a master sergeant. The formality made me uncomfortable. But they insisted on it.

  We began with platoon training, including mounted jeeps, recoilless rifles, mortars, bazookas, and other basics for a company of paratroopers. The training went smoothly — though I kept encountering major differences in attitude between my experience from home and theirs, in Africa.

  One day a jeep accident required the hospitalization of a couple of soldiers. I asked the staff officers for a report on what had happened.

  “It is not important,” said the company commander.

  “What do you mean, not important?” I asked, not understanding what he meant.

  “These things have no importance here,” he said apathetically.

  “I want a report,” I ordered. “Every soldier involved is to be interviewed.” Coming from the IDF, where an officer’s top priority is his soldiers’ safety, I found his attitude about the accident infuriatingly difficult to understand. Personal safety when handling weapons made sense to him. He knew how to punish a soldier careless with a weapon. But he and his fellow officers did not understand the need for self-discipline in handling vehicles a
s carefully as weapons. Most of all, the Ugandan officers did not regard their soldiers’ lives as important.

  It took three months of training to reach a full company drill, involving integrated platoon maneuvers. To conduct a proper exercise, we needed some real room for the recoilless rifles and mortars. Nowhere in the immediate vicinity of Jinja seemed appropriate, so I searched the maps, finding an area about four hundred kilometers south.

  I called in the Ugandan staff officers. “We’re going here,” I said, pointing to the map. They looked at me as if I had lost my senses.

  “It’s four hundred kilometers … It’s far to drive … It’s a lot of administrative work to move the entire company …” the Ugandans complained. I ignored the bellyaching.

  But after the meeting, Bar-Akiva approached me, appalled by my plan. “Muki, you don’t understand. People don’t work hard here, they don’t do things that way here.”

  “I’m here to train them,” I insisted, “and I fully intend to fulfill my assignment to the best of my ability.”

  Itzik and I compromised by letting Burka decide. As mission chief, the ultimate authority for the Israeli military delegation in Uganda, he lived in Kampala. Close to Amin and in touch with Israel, Burka always knew the gossip from home. “Itzik says you’re going overboard with your training,” he said.

  “We went through a long course,” I explained, “and I think we should carry out a proper company drill, emphasizing the use of recoilless files. That’s the place to do it. There’s no other place. So what if it’s four hundred kilometers?” I asked. I leaned forward in my chair, waiting for his response.

  “You know what?” he said, laughing, taking a cake from the tray brought in by a servant. “No problem. Go ahead. Do it.”

  About ten days before the drill, I decided to drive down to scout out the area before finalizing the plan. Itzik Ban-Akiva invited himself along, and so did the two other Israelis posted in the Jinja area.

  We left early in the morning, spent a few hours in the field, and then started home. Foreboding feelings that I could not quite pin down bothered me all the way back. Sometimes I get premonitions, and something felt wrong. Certainly, my feelings had something to do with a road accident: I refused to let anyone else drive. But on the way back, after nearly 350 kilometers of driving on the dusty roads of southern Uganda — and after the other guys in the car pestered me quite a bit — I handed over the wheel to Itzik. Since he was a former officer of the 101st and a member of the Egged bus cooperative, I trusted his driving. Twenty kilometers later he braked and swerved to avoid something on the road, losing control of my beautiful Peugeot. We rolled over three times before it came to a stop in the middle of an African field. From what seemed to be out of nowhere, farmers and villagers came to watch the strangers in their fields. Luckily, nobody was hurt, and the car started right up. We used our fists to pound out the dent in the car roof and finished the ride home.

  With the accident behind us, I expected the foreboding feeling to go away. It did not-and for good reason, I learned when we returned to Jinja.

  During the ten days of preparation for the trip south for the drill, the gossip in Jinja said the Libyans had offered large sums of money to Amin-if he would kick us out of the country.

  The day before the drill, the base commander in Jinja invited us into his office. “Mr. Qaddafi says Libyan officers can train us better than Israelis,” he said, laughing at the idea. We all joined in. “It is only politics,” he added with a sigh, and then dropped a bombshell. “But it is good you’ll be away from the base for a few days on your drill. Some Libyan officers are coming to Uganda to visit bases and see for themselves what they might be able to offer us. They’ll be visiting our base. So it’s actually for the best you’re not here when they come.”

  Back in my office, I called Burka. He confirmed it all. “I sent a cable to Jerusalem today, but there’s nothing to worry about. I spoke with Amin. Everything’s under control,” he promised me.

  The next day, I took the entire company south, and the drill went ahead just as we planned. On the last day of the exercise, some of the soldiers became excited about a small herd of elephants and a group of giraffes about a mile away from our camp.

  By then, even I had become blasé about seeing such magnificent animals in the wild. But something in the soldiers’ manner gave me an uneasy feeling. Watching them, I did not need to understand Swahili to figure out that they wanted to try a rocket-propelled grenade on the animals.

  “Do I understand correctly?” I asked the Ugandan company commander. “They think they are going to shoot the elephant? With an RPG?”

  The company commander smiled at me. “Yes,” he said, “for the ivory.”

  It shocked me. “Absolutely not,” I said. “Nobody is to do any such thing.”

  “Why not, Captain Betser?” he asked. “It has nothing to do with the drill. It will be after the drill.”

  “When I’m here,” I shot back, “everything has something to do with the drill. Now, give the order. Tell them to stop.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “There are many of these animals. What difference does one dead elephant make?”

  “The law says you’re not allowed to shoot them,” I pointed out.

  “The law is for civilians. We are soldiers,” he answered proudly.

  I shook my head slowly back and forth. “No,” I said softly, my most threatening tone. One of the trainees in the three-week IDF paratroopers’ course, he knew I meant business. And training these paratroopers had as much to do with making them good citizens as it did with making them good soldiers. As a guest in his country I never spoke against Amin, but I taught his soldiers that loyalty in a modern army must be to the state and its institutions — including the law — not a personality. Besides, I loved Africa for its nature more than anything else. The idea of using an RPG on the elephant made me sick.

  “Not this time,” he told his soldiers, his message clear: Wait until Captain Betser was gone. But he would have to be careful. I think he understood that if I caught any one of them using military equipment to shoot animals for fun — or profit — I might shoot them.

  Back from the full-company drill, we heard the Libyans had come and gone. I called Burka to ask what had happened. “Amin’s playing with the Libyans,” he said. “He wants to see how much money they’ll offer him.”

  “Maybe he’s playing with us,” I suggested.

  “No, no, everything’s fine. Everything’s under control.”

  I hung up with my foreboding feeling stronger than ever. Nobody in the course at Beit Berl had ever pointed out that the Arabs — particularly Egypt, north of Uganda-might get worried over our involvement in Uganda. They might think that we planned to use the Ugandan air base at Entebbe as a staging ground for Israeli air attacks on Egypt or other Arab states in North Africa. No such plan existed, but the Arabs seemed to believe it. Nobody told us, “Gentlemen, the Arabs will do whatever they can to get us out of Africa.”

  And since everyone knew about Amin’s “eccentricities” but never openly discussed them, nobody dared raise the possibility that he would indeed throw us out of the country. Burka called the Libyan visit “bad manners on Amin’s part” but nothing for us to worry about.

  But less than a week after I brought my Ugandan paratroopers back to Jinja, Amin surprised us. He gave twenty-four hours to all the non-military Israeli organizations and companies to leave Uganda. Israelis working for Mekorot, the hydrology company; Solel Boneh, the construction company that had built the airport at Entebbe; and other contractors, suddenly saw their personal plans in ruin. Many had brought their families, put their children in school, and planned a life there for more than a couple of years.

  I called Burka. “How can he throw them out like this?” I asked.

  “Politics,” Burka said. “That’s all-politics. He’ll throw them out and let those of us in the military delegation stay. Don’t worry. It’s all a show for the Libyans.�
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  Up until then, the Ugandans had treated those of us from the Israeli military delegations with utmost respect. Even when we were in civilian clothes, our identity cards as officers issued by the Ugandan Army got us through roadblocks that field up regular traffic for hours or even days.

  That sense of immunity-and the false confidence that we controlled Amin and not the other way around-blinded us to reality. Within forty-eight hours, he would strip away our charter, giving the military legation twenty-four hours to pack and leave.

  From our privileged status we suddenly fell to the position of unwanted nobodies. People we knew in Jinja, Kampala, and elsewhere in the country suddenly became unavailable to us.

  In Uganda barely three and a half months, Nurit and I and little Shaul had collected little to pack. But other Israeli families, older than us and much longer in Jinja, had collected possessions from over as much as four years of life in Africa. We helped our Israeli neighbors pack. After a while I headed back to our house to load the car. Reaching the yard, I found half a platoon of Ugandan soldiers parading to the front door. An officer I did not know stood on the front walkway, hands on his hips. The old servant, George, the gardener’s grandfather, stood watching unhappily from the distance.

  In my trouser waistband under my shirt I carried a revolver issued to me at the Israeli embassy when I first arrived in Uganda. All members of the Israeli military delegation in Uganda carried such revolvers, keeping them secret from the Ugandans, for just such an emergency.

  I said nothing to the Ugandan platoon commander. He said nothing to me, ignoring my presence. He followed his men into the house. I followed him.

  While they raided the refrigerator he used a short fly-stick to flick at objects that interested him. He walked slowly, inspecting each room, as if he planned to take possession. I remained silent, but followed quietly, watching, aware of his soldiers’ eyes on me, but his eyes deliberately avoided mine.