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

by Moshe Betser

  Arik finally lifted his head. He looked at me. “The paratroopers have tried breaking through,” he began, “and Shaked is doing a terrific job advancing. But I need your fighters to get through those groves.” He pointed to the northwest.

  About five hundred meters away, a wide green swath of plantations tended by the peasants of the area broke the flat scraggly plain of desert. I raised my binoculars. I saw orange trees, date palms, and a stretch of mango. The maps showed irrigation canals lacing the plantations, cutting through the red sand. To my farmer’s eye, the groves looked very good, and well tended. Beyond them lay the strategic Ismailiya-Cairo road.

  I took some soldiers and began walking toward the groves, hearing Arik on the radio talking to the armored crews. “Can you guys pinpoint the treetops, to get rid of spotters and snipers?”

  A voice came back on the radio. “We’ve hit every tree. Believe me, whoever was in there is gone by now.”

  “It’s a pleasure fighting with you,” Arik said. But he knew as well as I did that we could not be sure the tank guns had hit all the spotters inside the groves, and that some had not remained behind to watch for us and radio our positions to their artillery.

  I moved my forces forward onto the red soil, right up to the edges of the plantation, and then stopped to wait for Arik. A pair of Egyptian villagers on two donkeys loaded down with packages, rode slowly past, ignoring us, seemingly ignoring the war itself.

  Arik caught up with us in an APC and we sat down on the sand behind it. “Here’s the plan,” he announced. “You go in with halftracks, and Natan Ben-Ari will lead the tanks,” said Arik, referring to the tank battalion commander with him. Natan and I exchanged glances and then we both looked to Arik, outlining his scheme. “You’ll move ahead of us, creating a moving box of fire to your left, right, and forward, until you’re on the other side in the open sand.”

  Natan rounded up a few tanks while I put together a dozen halftracks. But neither of us liked the assignment. Without any intelligence about the whereabouts of the snipers, minefields, or any other defense the Egyptians had installed along the line, we might be walking into a death trap.

  “What kind of assignment is this?” Natan complained to me. “No intelligence, no air support, nothing.”

  “Let’s first see if it is possible,” I said. I could tell from Natan’s expression that he did not like the idea of telling Arik it might not be possible. “If we can’t do it,” I promised Natan, “I’ll tell him.”

  Natan gave in. We worked for an hour, scouting the edges of the plantation, trying to formulate a plan. But we could not see beyond the thick green line of vegetation. Without a single aerial photograph or a single observation from inside the groves, we had nothing to work with. I decided to tell Arik about our reservations. But Arik surprised us when we went back to him. “Because of the cease-fire, we’re postponing the mission,” he said before I had the chance to tell him that Natan and I found inherent flaws in the plan. He relieved Natan and asked me to stay

  “Listen, the cease-fire won’t hold. I’m sure of it. So here’s what we’ll do. You go in with your boys. No armor — on foot. I’ll be ready with artillery in case you need it. If we can get through, we’ll be able to speed all the way to Ismailiya.”

  It made a little more sense than his original plan. By going in on foot, without armor, we could use all our skills as stealthy fighters instead of announcing our arrival with tanks and guns firing. I organized my troops and we began moving forward slowly and quietly, two columns leapfrogging from cover to cover, everyone on alert in the dark dusty road.

  Only an occasional ruffling leaf from a soft breeze disturbed the quiet. But inside the groves, where in any tree around us a sniper might be watching, even this method seemed too risky. It made no sense to take a large force of fighters across the orchards without any intelligence.

  The treetops blocked the starlight of the desert. For all I knew, there might be snipers up in one of the huge branches of the palms or an artillery spotter able to radio back our position to an artillery unit somewhere far beyond our reach. A hundred meters into the groves, with at least another four hundred to go and the cease-fire only a few hours away, I made a decision. Instead of risking the entire force, I’d go across alone to find a route for the troops.

  “Amit,” I called to my deputy. A reserve captain, Amit hailed from Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. I picked him as my deputy when Amiram gave me the command over the force after he was wounded at Fa’id. Pedantic and meticulous, Amit enjoyed the calculations of risk in an operation and the hard work involved to reduce the risk to a minimum.

  “We’re a big force,” I said, “and we’ll make noise no matter how hard we try to keep quiet. And cease-fire or no cease-fire, they’ll open fire on us if they see us moving. Any movement is going to be a threat-and an excuse for opening fire. People will get hurt.”

  “So what do you want to do?” he asked.

  “You and I will go in alone, cross all the orchards, get to the other side, and get the intelligence we need to move the whole force across safely.”

  Amit agreed my method carried the least risk. We summoned the officers and told them our plan. “Amit and I are going in alone,” I said. “We’ll maintain radio contact. If anything happens, you come get us out.”

  We crossed the five hundred meters in a crouch and crawling, moving as silently as possible. About halfway into the grove we passed a tank that had managed to penetrate the woods, only to be destroyed by an Egyptian anti-tank missile.

  I do not know if our concern before entering the groves was justified, but as we crawled the last few yards out of the groves into a suddenly different terrain of soft sand dunes, I felt relieved to be out of the dark maze of the plantation.

  We crawled up the first dune, peering into the darkness through night-scope binoculars. Only sand dunes appeared in the scopes. No signs of enemy positions disrupted the view. In daylight, I expected to see the Ismailiya-Cairo road on the horizon.

  We retraced our steps, and then took the men through the groves along the route we found, digging in beyond the grove before dawn. We posted guards, to give everyone a chance for a nap.

  An excited fighter crouching by my side woke me at daybreak.

  “Two Egyptian peasants on donkeys are heading directly toward us. It looks like they’ll walk right into us,” he said.

  For the peasants, it was a season for harvesting, not war. “Stay put,” I ordered my soldiers. I climbed to the top of the dune, peering over it to watch the peasants approach.

  When they were about twenty-five meters away, an Egyptian officer suddenly appeared from behind a dune about thirty meters beyond the peasants.

  We did not know about them and they did not know about us, even though the whole night we lay there, forty meters apart, separated by a sandy white depression between the two dunes.

  “Yalla, yalla,” the Egyptian officer shouted. “Beat it. Get out of here!” It startled the peasants out of their early-morning daze.

  Obviously unhappy, the two farmers slowly turned their donkeys around. I kept my eye on the Egyptian. To my dismay, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted some of my soldiers. He gave a shout and ducked down into his hiding place. Seconds later, accurate heavy fire from assault rifles and machine guns rapped at us.

  “Return fire!” I ordered. The noise level grew quickly as my soldiers scrambled to return the fire.

  A few tanks behind us began to move, firing an occasional shell. If they moved up to our position, we could outflank the Egyptians, whose fire grew more intense.

  I ran across the sand to my radio man, wanting to report our position and predicament back to division and demand that tanks immediately back us up. For some reason he forgot the frequency.

  “Who remembers Arik’s frequency?” I shouted. Yoav, a fighter from Nahalal, shouted out the number. The radio man made the connection. “I need tanks!” I reported. “Immediately! The groves are clear!”

&nb
sp; Suddenly, Arik’s voice came over the radio. “Muki,” he said in a fatherly tone. “It is time to withdraw.”

  “No, I want to attack. We can get them.” “No,” he said. “Come back.”

  I put down the microphone and looked around. The casualties mounted. One soldier nursed a wounded leg, another lay bleeding heavily from a wound in his chest. Altogether, seven soldiers were knocked out of action. The Egyptians on the other side of the dune outgunned us. Reluctantly, I gave the order to pull back. One by one the crews left the dune until I was the last to crawl away from the Egyptian fire, back into the groves that had so frightened us the night before.

  About a hundred meters back inside the grove, wounded pride made me change my mind. Instead of falling back all the way to the other side of the grove, I gave the order to dig in and prepare for a new round of combat. If the Egyptians did not keep the cease-fire here, I figured, they will be breaking it elsewhere. A cease-fire announcement does not necessarily end a war.

  Arik authorized my decision. The Egyptians continued to fire into the groves, but we evacuated our wounded and dug into our foxholes. After a little while, a tense quiet prevailed, giving me a few moments of solitude to mourn Amit Ben-Horin, who, just a few hours before, had been at my side as we sneaked across the mango grove.

  “He jumped up when the Egyptians started firing,” a soldier who saw it told me. “He managed to get out ‘There’s a cease-fire!’ when the bullet caught him.”

  His death only strengthened my determination to stick to the grove, to hold the ground — and move forward again if the Egyptians violated the cease-fire.

  But suddenly, Menachem Digli, a former commander of Sayeret Matkal and now head of the collection branch in intelligence on the general staff, was on the radio network looking for me.

  I gave him a report — casualties, and Amit’s death. The radio fell silent for a few minutes. But then he was back with orders to fall back.

  I explained to him that I was at the easternmost point on the Israeli front inside Egypt, after an engagement with the enemy. They would interpret the move as retreat. “It’s a sensitive place, and there’s no logical reason to give it up,” I emphasized.

  “No choice,” Digli told me. “You’re the only special force in the area for the job, and it’s extremely important.”

  But if we left before replacements arrived, we’d lose the position to the Egyptians. I didn’t want that to happen. I decided to go through the front’s command-to Arik directly, a few hundred meters behind me.

  I started back on foot, but found a jeep and started driving toward Arik’s, but I ran into Uzi Yairi, the paratroops brigade commander, and his deputy, Amnon Shahak, at his side.

  They had led the fight for the Chinese Farm, misnamed because of the Asian calligraphy left behind by Japanese agricultural advisers who worked there with the Egyptians before the Six-Day War. The battle for the Chinese Farm on the east bank of the Suez Canal became one of the toughest the army faced in the first days of the war in Sinai. Uzi lost fifty-eight soldiers, but now he wanted to know how Amit had died. I told him, and added my reasons for not leaving the line at the deepest point of Israel’s penetration of Egypt. A former commander of Sayeret Matkal, Uzi understood my point of view.

  “Don’t agree,” Uzi suggested.

  “I have no intention of leaving,” I said. “And that’s it.”

  A few minutes later I was at Arik’s field command, trying to convince him that he should let us stay.

  “This assignment’s more important,” he finally said. “You’re going to helicopter to the top of Jebel Ataka,” he told me. I knew it as the site of an Egyptian radar station, about twenty-five miles south of Fa’id and the highest peak on the west bank of the Suez Canal. The air force had managed to take out the Egyptian radar station on its peak in the first hours of the war. “You’ll take the position, and use it to help Bren,” he said as we studied the map.

  From the top of Jebel Ataka we would be able to look down on the besieged Third Army, east of the Canal, inside Sinai. Avraham “Bren” Adan was racing south with an armored division on the west side of the Canal, to close off the Third Army’s rear door back into Egypt across the Canal.

  Spotting enemy positions for Bren’s long guns was a good job, I thought. But I wanted to take out the Egyptians who had killed Amit.

  Arik finally convinced me. “If anything will make the war stop, this is it,” Arik said. “It will be the siege of the Third Army.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, sitting up front near the helicopter pilot and listening through the headsets to the air traffic, I heard that antiaircraft guns ahead had just shot down a chopper on the same flight path we were taking on our way to Jebel Ataka. Nobody expected survivors.

  The pilot glanced over at me, wondering if I would tell my troops in the hold and on a second chopper beside us. I decided the nerve-wracking ride over the battlefields was ugly enough, looking down on the huge graveyards of twisted, burnt equipment like huge tombstones in a chaotic cemetery. I warned them of the ack-ack ahead, but said nothing about the downed chopper.

  Landing, we expected resistance. Instead, it felt like a deluxe trip to a magnificent view. The ragged peaks of Jebel Ataka looked down over a vast territory. Due east was the Egyptian Third Army, blanketing the flatland between the Suez Canal and the Mitla Pass, inside Sinai. To our northeast, Bren’s division advanced toward Suez to complete the siege, at the southern mouth of the canal on the Suez Gulf. It all looked like pieces on a vast chessboard.

  We immediately began relaying our information to headquarters. It became like a game, radioing in a report about Egyptian attempts to stymie Bren’s advance and within minutes seeing Bren’s armor change position in response to our calls.

  With the enemy oblivious of our position and the air force keeping control of the skies in the area, it almost did feel like a picnic. But within a few hours of our arrival, one of my scouts reported Egyptian soldiers approaching from another peak of the mountain. I took my binoculars for a look. Even from the distance, their demeanor said they wanted to go home, not look for a fight.

  Within minutes we deployed into an ambush for the fifteen approaching Egyptian soldiers. They walked right into a short burst that cut down a few in front. The rest dropped their weapons and surrendered.

  We had a dozen hungry prisoners on our hands, and gave them food in exchange for information. But before we learned much more than that they had abandoned their position after their officers abandoned them, we saw more dejected troops coming our way.

  By the end of the day we needed to share our water and hardtack rations with forty Egyptian prisoners.

  I reported back to division headquarters about the prisoners, and we continued our work. But over the next two days, someone at general headquarters decided that the reports of Egyptian troops on the mountain meant that we were in danger.

  The radio began squawking commands at me to get ready to withdraw from the mountain. “Everything’s fine,” I tried to tell them. “They pose no danger to us,” I said. “We can handle it.”

  “No,” came back orders. “Get your force organized and be ready to move. We’ve already sent choppers.”

  I saw no reason to leave the mountaintop, with its perfect view of the Egyptian Third Army on the plains below. But I realized someone back at headquarters had got butterflies in his stomach when he heard of our contact with the enemy. Sure enough, barely an hour later, two helicopters landed. We took the few officers from amongst the prisoners and freed the rest before leaving on board the choppers.

  The cease-fire in the south went into effect the day after we left Jebel Ataka, with the culmination of the IDF siege of the Egyptian Third Army. The Americans and Soviets negotiated it, with Henry Kissinger shuttling around the Middle East to arrange it. By laying siege to the Third Army, we forced the Egyptians to negotiate for the first time. It began with water deliveries, but eventually turned into a disengagement
of forces — and ultimately helped produce the 1978 Camp David peace accords, Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab neighbor, five years later.

  However, the fighting continued in the north along the lines we helped draw in the first week of the war. As the helicopter began its descent at the air base, I decided that until a full-fledged cease-fire with Syria went into effect, my unit and I belonged at the front.

  Getting out of the chopper, three helicopter pilots approached me. We knew each other from years of working together. “Muki,” asked one of them, “did you know that a helicopter crashed in front of you on your way to Jebel Ataka?”

  “Yes,” I said wearily.

  “Gilad E. in your force?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The pilot was his brother, Ofer.”

  A shiver ran through my body. They were from Kibbutz Yifat in the Jezreel Valley, and everyone in the valley knew the brothers’ family. Their father was principal at the Yifat High School, where many of the kibbutzniks of the valley went to school.

  I waited a few minutes before telling Gilad, as if by delaying the news I could have made it never happen. I even walked slowly, trying to pick out Gilad from the dust-covered fighters. The three pilots followed silently behind me.

  “Gilad,” I said, finding him. Deciding to give it to him straight, I added only, “Ofer’s fallen.”

  “Ofer!” he cried, his voice breaking. I continued telling him what happened, doubting he even heard me as the sorrow broke him. “He was ahead of us in a chopper flying through a canyon on our flight to Jebel Ataka,” I told him, putting a hand on his shoulder, hoping to ease his pain. “Anti-aircraft fire caught him.”

  “There’s a helicopter waiting for us,” said Shefi, the senior pilot. “Come, we’ll take you home,” he said.

  I watched the four climb on board the chopper, saddened by my soldier’s personal loss, proud of the traditions of comrades-in-arms of the Israel Defense Forces and the way they came to their friend’s brother to bring the tragic news and take him home.