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

by Moshe Betser

  Finally, it arrived. I heard it first and ran out ahead of my mother and father to greet our new horse. We named her Sofia, after the capital of Bulgaria, her birthplace. Delighted to discover she was pregnant, I looked forward to the foal’s birth with increasing excitement as the months passed. In the final weeks, the first thing every morning I ran to the barn to see if Sofia finally gave birth during the night.

  One morning in early spring I went out to the barn to discover a beautiful brown foal born during the night. But its very first day of life, it somehow damaged its knee. It could not even stand. The veterinarian said the best thing to do would be to put down the foal.

  “No!” I cried out, promising to take personal care of it, nursing it back to health. The doctor was skeptical. My father believed in me. Thus, for days afterward, I began my day before school by treating the foal with the medicines left by the doctor. I stroked it and petted it and whispered into its ear as I rubbed the vet’s ointment into the infection. “You’ll be fine, and one day I’ll take you riding in the valley,” I promised the little horse, deciding to call him Foal until he could stand by himself. Even the vet admitted after a few days that he thought my treatment helped my beloved foal, though he still needed my help to stand. And as soon as I returned from school, I ran to visit my little foal.

  But one day I came home from school and found the barn empty. Maybe he finally healed, I thought, hoping to find the foal with the mare in the field. Instead I found Sofia with my father. “The foal died,” he told me bluntly.

  “Where is he?” I demanded.

  “I took it to the wadi at the end of the field,” my father told me.

  Heartbroken, I jumped on Sofia and raced across the field to the distant wadi. As we approached the bulrushes lining the narrow creek, Sofia neighed shrilly. My father had hitched her to the wagon to carry the foal’s body to the wadi. She knew the foal lay not far off. I did not want her to see her dead baby. I jumped off the mare, tied her to a tree, and ran to see the foal.

  Nobody ever cried in our family. When I realized tears flowed down my cheeks, I ran back to Sofia and galloped away from that place, away from the death of my closest friend.

  Finally, far from the dump and the moshav, I slowed down and slipped off Sofia in a eucalyptus stand beside a field, to mourn alone the loss of the young horse I loved so much. I sat that way for a long hour, letting the sadness and sorrow overwhelm me.

  Only when the sun began its descent toward dusk did I get back on Sofia for the sad ride home. As we passed the wadi, Sofia neighed again, trying to call out to her foal, heading for the wadi. I, too, wanted to see the foal again — but alive, on its feet, growing up. But I knew that was impossible.

  “No!” I ordered, reining her back forcefully to the route home. “It’s time to look ahead,” I whispered into her ear, leaning over her mane to her ear. “Abba will take you to a stud farm, and there will be another foal.”

  I heeled her into a gallop past the wadi. And as we rode past, I turned a switch in my mind, not forgetting the young foal, but looking ahead to Sofia’s next pregnancy, already planning how to keep the next foal safe and sound. She neighed one last time, and we raced on. My tears dried in the wind. And just as I promised her and myself, Sofia gave birth to a healthy foal a year later.

  YOM KIPPUR

  “Intelligence says a large concentration of Syrian Army forces is lined up against the Golan Heights, and an even larger concentration of Egyptian forces along the Suez Canal,” said Giora.

  We were gathered in his office for our Friday afternoon staff meeting and the next day was Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. On Yom Kippur a remarkable quiet falls over the entire country. No cars move on the roads. Many, if not most, are fasting and in synagogue. In 1973, the holiday fell on a Saturday. Most of us planned on spending a quiet day at home. A Sayeret Matkal crew to handle emergencies would stay on duty, of course, at the base.

  “Intelligence estimates are calling it an exercise,” Giora reassured us about the Arab maneuvers. “But it involves virtually all their armies — infantry, armored personnel carriers, tanks, surface-to-air missile batteries, engineering forces and artillery. Just in case, we’re going to alert-level three.”

  The IDF’s emergency reserve call-up system kicks in at the next level on the scale. Ordinarily, a soldier away from the Unit leaves a detailed report of how to locate him in case of emergencies, whether it is his parents’ phone number or his girlfriend’s. He also must check in every few hours to find out if the Unit called. And, like all combat units in the army, we have pre-established pickup points around the country, where transport vehicles gather to collect unit members.

  The same system is used by the entire emergency reserve call — up system in the country, but we used it more often than other units and practiced it regularly, to make sure our call — ups could speedily return every Sayeret Matkal member — whether enlisted man on weekend leave or reservist at work — to base. In the Galilee we kept three pickup stations in centrally located towns, including one in the Jezreel Valley.

  Listening to Giora’s briefing, two things came to mind. In May that year, Egypt and Syria-the two largest and most dangerous Arab armies lined up against us-had gone into a week of massive troop maneuvering exercises along the Suez Canal and opposite our lines on the Golan. For a week the IDF stayed on alert, quietly calling up reserves throughout the army until the enemy exercises ended. So, as I listened to Giora explain that Military Intelligence regarded the Egyptian and Syrian maneuvers as an exercise, I decided that if they field two full drills in less than six months, they must be serious. War might not be imminent, but close.

  The second thought echoed just as strongly. It was the memory of a prediction made by Moshe Dayan earlier that year. He believed that “an electronic summer”-high-tech air battles between our planes and theirs during the summer-would be a portent of war. In September, Israeli Mirages and Phantoms shot down thirteen Syrian MiGs in a dogfight over the Lebanese coast, a perfect example of the “electronic summer” Dayan predicted.

  Dayan believed the Arabs knew they would never reach Tel Aviv or Haifa. But if they grabbed a piece of the Sinai or a chunk of the Golan, even for only a few hours, the diplomatic wheels would start moving. International pressure on Israel would do the rest. In those days, only Washington supported Israel. The Western Europeans, worried about their oil supplies from the Middle East, weak in the face of Arab terrorism, and anxious about the Soviet Union to their east, kept at arm’s length from us.

  So, driving home to Nahalal that Friday afternoon, I played war games in my mind, imagining the calculations the Egyptian and Syrian commanders must be making. Assuming Dayan was right, I thought, the Egyptians planned a canal crossing with the aim of taking a piece of Sinai. I wondered where they would try it. In the north of the Little Bitter Lake? Or south of the Great Bitter Lake? Maybe at Port Said or Ras al-Ash, where I saw the War of Attrition begin. A Syrian attempt to break through into a pocket of the Golan Heights suddenly became easy to imagine.

  Nonetheless, driving into Nahalal, I decided that whatever happened, the air force — with help from the armored corps — could take care of it in a pre-emptive strike. Full-scale war still seemed improbable, if not impossible. And if the Arabs attacked, I believed, the air force and armored corps would quickly turn the enemy back.

  Falling ten days after the prayers for the New Year, Yom Kippur is a day for soul-searching about the sins of the past year, asking forgiveness, and wiping the slate clean for the coming year. At Nahalal, my grandparents and their comrades gave up the traditional religion of their own grandparents. Yom Kippur in Nahalal meant a quiet day with family and friends.

  That night, while I was visiting some friends in the village, the wife of a pilot friend took me aside to ask a surprising question. “You’re not at the base?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “why do you ask?”

  “They canceled all leave fo
r the pilots,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, but with a slight tone of superiority, as if to emphasize the importance of pilots. But her comment reassured me. On alert, the air force had obviously studied the intelligence on the enemy maneuvers that summer, and drew up plans to combat those formations. Our pilots easily outmaneuvered their Syrian and Egyptian counterparts during the “electronic summer.” We knew the Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that Moscow supplied to both Syria and Egypt created problems, but I trusted our air force to overcome them. It had won the war in 1967, and proved its superiority in the air ever since. I decided not to worry.

  Saturdays are for sleeping late. At ten in the morning, I sipped my first coffee of the day, sitting in the garden in front of our little three-room house, watching six-year-old Shaul show off on his bicycle in the quiet street in front of the house. The phone rang inside. A moment later, Nurit called out, “Muki, the Unit’s on the phone.”

  “Muki,” the secretary began. I heard something strained in her tone of voice. “You have to get back. Right away. They raised the alert.” She did not need to add a word.

  I grabbed a uniform and checked my chimidan—the duffel bag that I always kept handy. It field my Match, the AK-47 Kalashnikov I carried since Shaked after the Six-Day War, booty from Egyptian and Syrian armies. I always made sure to keep at least half a dozen spare ammunition magazines, loaded and taped into crosses for quick loading. A thick jackknife, full of tools, sat in a pocket just over my heart.

  Nurit watched me check my equipment. “So, that’s it,” she said. She knew about the alert. “It’s serious.”

  I nodded. “But don’t worry,” I promised. “Everything will be fine.” An artist, after the Six-Day War she painted all the bomb shelters of the moshav, covering the gray concrete entrances to the underground rooms with bright splashes of color. Like so many of us, she believed we never again would need the bunkers. Now it looked like they would be used again. We kissed goodbye, and I gave Shaul a hug before climbing into my army-issued four-wheel-drive Dodge 200, a high-chassis jeep that can carry six fully equipped soldiers and a bank of radios.

  Usually, nobody in Israel drives on Yom Kippur. Religious zealots are known to stone cars driving on the holy day; uncultured kids copy them for the fun. No radio or television broadcasts disturb the solemnity of the day.

  I started the car and drove slowly out of the calm and peaceful moshav, a perfect blue sky above. Aware of neighbors’ eyes on me as the car rolled through the village, I drove slowly, to prevent panic. But as soon as I reached the main road, I gunned the engine, racing on squealing tires through the curves of the Jezreel Valley road to Afula, without a single other car on the road.

  Before I had left the base on Friday, Digmi, the reserve pickup driver, told me that I could find him either at home or at his neighborhood synagogue. Now, his wife sent me to the prayer house. I strode into the hall in uniform, my Klatch over my shoulder. Digmi put down his prayer book and hustled out after me, still wrapped in his tallit (the Jewish prayer shawl).

  While Digmi ran home to get his truck, I raced on to the pickup point, finding a dozen Sayeret Matkal fighters waiting for him. I picked half a dozen to take in my jeep, and when Digmi showed up five minutes later, I put an officer in charge with instructions to wait another half hour for stragglers before following us south.

  At first we were the only car on the road. But gradually, other speeding military vehicles appeared on the roads. I cut 30 percent off the normal amount of time needed to drive from the Jezreel Valley to the Unit’s base.

  I walked into Giora’s office just as he announced to the already assembled officers: “Intelligence has adjusted its estimate. War is now probable. It will break out at eighteen hundred hours. We have to start preparing. And fast.”

  But we faced a major problem. For what, exactly, should we prepare? Sayeret Matkal, as Avraham Arnan conceived it, conducted special operations between wars. We planned in advance, on two or three targets that we defined or Intelligence gave us as an assignment from the general staff. No standing orders existed for Sayeret Matkal in case of war — and especially not a surprise attack on two fronts.

  The realization sank in that we knew how to fight — but not where. Most horribly, I saw, we might even get an order to sit out the war. I did not want to let that thought even cross my mind. Neither did Giora. But other officers in the Unit, believing in Arnan’s doctrine regarding Sayeret Matka’s value and purpose, raised the issue, indeed fought for us to stay at the base.

  “We can come up with ideas for targets and suggest them to the general staff,” Giora mused. But we all knew that whatever we suggested would need logistical coordination and distract the senior command from more pressing needs.

  Meanwhile, soldiers and officers poured onto the base. By noon, dozens of fighters and administrative staff — regulars, enlisted, and reservist — were milling about in the parade grounds, gearing up with supplies provided by our quartermasters.

  Commanders called together officers and then the soldiers, to brief them on what Giora had told us. But we knew little except that the latest word from “the Pit,” the underground command-and-control center for the entire IDF, deep under Defense Ministry headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv, was still calling the likelihood of war “probable.”

  Around twelve-thirty, Giora called in the senior officers. We crowded around the table in his office, some sitting, others standing. Cigarette smoke filled the air. “Gentlemen,” he began with a glance at his watch. “We have less than six hours to prepare. Intelligence says the Arab attack will definitely begin at eighteen hundred hours.”

  “What about the air force?” someone asked. “A pre-emptive strike?”

  He shook his head. “The government decided against one. They want it clear to the world that the Arabs attacked, not us.”

  He sent Amnon Biran, Sayeret Matkal’s senior intelligence officer at the time, over to Military Intelligence at the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv. Giora hoped Amnon would rustle up an assignment for us.

  I doubted it. Sayeret Matkal only handled operations it had planned for. Tradition would keep us on the base for the war, I feared. But we belonged on the front or behind enemy lines. We were Israel’s crack commandos, and could not sit by idly while the IDF went to war. I raised my hand. Giora gave me the floor.

  “We absolutely do not wait until they call us,” I said, letting my instincts speak for me. “Our job as fighters is to protect the State of Israel and its people,” I said. “We can’t wait for an assignment we know we won’t get, while war rages. We need to construct a framework to get us to the front as quickly as possible.”

  “For example?” Giora asked.

  “We send half the unit to the south and the other half north. We leave a small task force here, in case of emergency — or in case the general staff does come up with an assignment. Once we check in with the regional commands, they’ll know what to do with us.”

  The speech seemed to impress Giora, but others stuck to tradition, saying our value as special forces made it wrong to send us into the chaos of battle without a well-planned mission.

  The argument went on for a few minutes. Finally, Giora made a decision. Two forces go north to the Golan — one for the southern Golan and the other for the northern part of the Heights. A third force goes south to the Egyptian front. A fourth stays on the base, in case of an emergency.

  But less than an hour later, everything changed again. At exactly 1400 hours Egyptian and Syrian aircraft, artillery, and infantry began a concerted attack along the entire length of both fronts, across the Canal and into the Golan. Giora called us into his office for a third time, to break the news.

  “Let’s drop everything,” I argued. “All of us, to the north. Whatever happens along the Canal, the Sinai’s size can protect the Negev. But the Golan’s tiny, with settlements on the plateau and below in the Galilee.” I made it a demand, doing something extremely unusual: I raised my
voice. “We go north!”

  I rarely shout. They listened.

  Giora assigned Yonni, who had rushed in from the national staff college, to command a combined force of my regulars plus reservists under Yuri, a reserve major. Giora took command of Amitai Nahmani’s regulars, also reinforced by a reservist group. A third force remained at the base.

  Within the hour, our fighters were crammed into buses with all their equipment. Just before nightfall the buses pulled into a woods on the slopes of Mount Cana’an near Safed, where we established a field headquarters. Giora took Amiram Levine, Amnon Biran, me, and a communications officer over to Northern Command headquarters in Nazareth, to rustle up an assignment.

  It did not take long to realize that the Northern Command could not help us. No orderly intelligence flowed from the Golan, only radioed observations from front lines, where positions were falling up and down the Golan. The Syrian onslaught caused heavy casualties, and pressed toward the center of the Heights on its way to the edge, with an open road to Galilee.

  By Sunday morning, it became clear that looking for an assignment at the Northern Command, so close to the front, was worse than being back near Tel Aviv, so far away. At times, we heard the muffled artillery thumps carried south on the wind and saw bombladen Phantoms lumbering through the sky on their way up to the Heights trying to get through the Syrian SAM umbrella.

  “Let’s get hold of some APCs, half-tracks, anything to get us up to the Heights,” I suggested. “We’ll find Raful. He’ll know what to do with us.” By then, my former paratroops brigade commander had become a divisional commander on the Golan.

  Giora and I started asking around for transport and quickly ran into another problem. The transport officers at the Northern Command threw us out of their offices with shouts that they had already sent everything up to the front. “I saw APCs in a lot at the end of the base,” I pointed out.