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

by Moshe Betser

  SOUL-SEARCHING

  The Egyptians and Syrians made a huge mistake attacking on Yom Kippur. Only ten days earlier, on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, most Israelis would have been away from home — traveling, picnicking, hiking, or simply at the beach. If the Arabs had attacked on Rosh Hashanah, it would have taken many more hours than it did to get the reservists to battle and the roads would have been choked with tens of thousands of cars driven by panicked drivers trying to rush home — or to the front.

  And obviously, the dastardly nature of the attack on our holiest day did not crumble our morale; it elevated it.

  The Yom Kippur War taught me that we did not learn the right lessons from the Six-Day War. Passive after the Six-Day War, we waited for a phone call from the Arabs asking us to give back the land in exchange for peace. And gradually, for many, the possession of biblical homelands became more important than the security of the State of Israel.

  If I understood one thing about Zionism, I understood that it meant our ability to control our own destiny. We should have phoned the Arab leaders, making suggestions of our own for a peace settlement. Instead, the government, the military leadership, and most of the people went into a state of euphoria, believing in our invincibility and the Arabs’ incompetence, believing we could wait for peace.

  So the Yom Kippur War forced many people to do some serious soul-searching about certain beliefs we had carried around since 1967, when the Arabs ran instead of fought. Eventually, Golda and Dayan resigned. I don’t know if she ever understood why the people wanted her to go. I believe Dayan did understand, and he eventually returned to office as foreign minister under Menachem Begin, becoming one of the architects of peace with Egypt.

  Dado became the first IDF chief of staff forced to resign in midterm. He died brokenhearted a few years later. Gorodish went into exile, digging for diamonds in Central Africa in the hopes of striking it rich enough to mount a campaign to clear his name.

  Almost everyone in Israel paid a price for the hubris that led to the war. Nearly three thousand soldiers died on our side. Tens of thousands of Arab soldiers died.

  Inside the army, we also had soul-searching to do, even though our military performance in 1973 outdid 1967 for success. Too many errors of judgment by Intelligence, poor maintenance of emergency stores, and too much confusion in the reinforcement of the front lines called for a serious accounting. Nonetheless, brilliant field command by a few outstanding senior officers, combined with the determination of the rank-and-file soldiers to fight to the last bullet in battles like the Valley of the Tears, combined into a great military victory.

  For Sayeret Matkal too, I believed, the war proved to be both a success and a failure. I began my soul-searching in those first hours on the Golan, when I saw the Syrian tanks that reached Nafah, but it was my encounter with Arnan the next day, arguing about the Unit’s presence in the war, that firmed my opinion.

  I wanted to add a new vocation to the list of responsibilities Sayeret Matkal carried. For a special operations unit like ours to be truly effective, we needed to find a much different approach. We needed to define professional needs and develop and acquire equipment. We needed a military doctrine to develop dossiers for action that would pre-define the framework for our activities during wartime, so that everyone knew his job in advance.

  As soon as I returned to base from Sinai and we finished our debriefings and written reports, I began pushing Giora to call a meeting of the commanders, to talk about what we learned in the war — and to press for my idea to add new responsibilities to our mandate.

  But in those days between the cease-fire with Syria in November 1973 and Kissinger’s mediation between Jerusalem and Damascus for a formal separation of forces, we conducted missions.

  Typical of those months of nearly non-stop action was a night mission to destroy several Sherman tanks left behind in Syrian territory after the cease-fire. With their broken treads, we could not drive them out under cover of night, and towing them would be too risky as both a violation of the cease-fire and for the soldiers involved. But we obviously did not want the Syrians to get them as spoils of war.

  I took a force to handle three such tanks, and Uzi Dayan took another force to deal with one further behind the line. After planting chemical-fused bombs on each of the tanks, we crept back across the lines to our side. While the rest of the force went home to base, I waited to make sure we had indeed accomplished the mission. Chemical fuses are tricky, especially in the cold of the Golan in winter.

  I decided to take a nap while waiting for the blasts, figuring it would take an hour or two, and lay down on a cot in the corner of the bunker. “Wake me up as soon as the first one explodes,” I asked an officer.

  But dawn, not an explosion, woke me. I ran to the forward position and found the officer. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I demanded angrily, bursting in on the officer with a few of his colleagues.

  “You said to wake you when the charges went off,” the officer said innocently. “They didn’t.”

  I pulled out my binoculars and stepped forward to the sandbagged observation window. As I raised them to my eyes, one of the distant tanks burst into flames, and a moment later, an explosion echoed across the plain. It took another half hour for the second tank, and after that, the third tank and fourth tanks went up. All the while, through my binoculars, I watched the Syrian soldiers at their position opposite us depressed by the sight of the exploding tanks.

  Finally, in the spring of 1974, Kissinger succeeded in brokering a deal between Israel and Syria for a disengagement of forces, freeing us to begin planning. One weekend, Giora invited seven key officers of Sayeret Matkal to his apartment for a meeting: Ehud Barak, Yonni Netanyahu, Amiram Levine, Menachem Digli, Avashalom Horan, Uzi Dayan, and me.

  Informally, we referred to the retreat as “Whither the Unit?” Anything and everything could be raised, like a brainstorming session to plan an operation, only in civilian clothes and in a relaxed atmosphere. For this session, we sipped our tea and black coffee slowly, and those who smoked took the time to empty the ashtrays. A few beers came out, but I stuck to my black tea with sugar.

  They all knew that I wanted to use special operations forces to develop full dossiers on wartime targets. But going into the session, the consensus said implementation of my plan would disrupt the routine of Sayeret Matkal.

  We began with a review of the war as we experienced it. Unlike during the Six-Day War, when Sayeret Matkal, like the paratroops sayeret, sat on runways waiting for assignments that never came, we had participated in the Yom Kippur War. However, as a result of the character of the war and its length, the Unit’s product could have been better-if plans had existed for missions before the war broke out. I argued that the Unit needed to become like the air force, where every pilot knows well in advance his tasks and goals in wartime, because they prepare for it months, indeed years, ahead of time.

  Without going into who said what, I can say that all sorts of ideas came up. Some said nothing should be changed. Others pointed to the APC shortage as the only problem. A couple admitted they would have preferred to be on special operations.

  I went well prepared to that meeting, and gradually they came around to my point of view. But it became clear that with the end of the meeting, people would return to their routine: this one in school, that one in the armored corps, this one at the paratroopers, and that one in the Unit.

  By the end of the meeting, I knew my next step. I told Giora I wanted leave without pay, but to continue serving as the senior reservist commander. From outside the army, I could go to anyone in the system. From within, I would be limited by the hierarchy of the bureaucracy. And meanwhile, I would incrementally implement my plans for adding a wartime capability to the best special forces unit in the IDF.

  From the start Giora understood what I wanted. He agreed. Turning down some tempting offers to become a battalion commander, I took a civilian job with ChimAvir, a small crop-dusting ai
rcraft company, with offices in Tel Aviv near the Defense Ministry compound and IDF general headquarters. ChimAvir’s owner/operator understood I regarded it as a part-time job, but was glad to have me. The army called the rest of the time, and I commuted from Nahalal, using my rented apartment for overnight stays in Tel Aviv when work called.

  Giora agreed to my most important condition: the Unit would call me for any emergency operation involving the rescue of hostages field by terrorists.

  And the terrorists kept us busy. A few days after I began work with ChimAvir, a call from the Unit came to my office.

  I ran the four flights down the stairs to the street and to my parked car, where my chimidan duffel bag was, as always, in the trunk, stocked with my needs: uniform, boots, and helmet; Kalashnikov, six 30-bullet magazines crisscrossed and taped for quick loading. In the web-belt I kept two canteens, six grenades, a flare-gun, and pockets packed with incidental neccessities-a jackknife, bandages, a shank of rope, and other tools. I raced through traffic to the base, leaving my car at the edge of the tarmac and racing to the helicopter just before it lifted off. I threw the chimidan onto the Sikorsky’s deck and climbed aboard, joining fighters from the Unit on their way to answer the call.

  During the flight north Giora briefed us with what he knew: a Palestinian terror group had crossed the border into Kiryat Shmona, a town on the Lebanese border, and had taken over an apartment in the northernmost neighborhood in the town. Holding a family hostage, they wanted Israel to release all the terrorists in our prisons. Our task: to take over the building, rescue the hostages, and capture or kill the terrorists.

  We knew about hit-and-run terrorist infiltration across the border and hit-and-run attacks on cars on the road or isolated buildings along the border. Like any combat force, the terrorists had planned an avenue of escape from the scene. But as more information from Kiryat Shmona flowed to us through the radio while we flew north, it sounded like a completely new situation.

  They had crossed the border, and field a building. Instead of blowing it up and retreating as usual, they field hostages, demanding the government negotiate with them. Until then, the only terrorists on suicide missions that we had encountered came from the Japanese Red Army, PLO allies who arrived at the international airport in Lod disguised as passengers and pulled out machine guns, spraying the terminal with bullets. Twenty — four had died — mostly Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land — before police and guards shot the terrorists dead. One terrorist survived — a Japanese student named Kozo Okamoto, who was eventually released from a life sentence in our jails during a prisoner exchange with Ahmed Jibril’s terrorist group after the Lebanon war in the 1980s.

  Now, as the chopper flew into Kiryat Shmona, it became obvious we had arrived too late. Smoke poured out of the building. The outdoor balcony hung from broken beams, destroyed by explosives, a gaping hole in the wall behind it.

  Standard operating procedure in such cases is for the first troops on the scene to seal it off from curious onlookers — and to stay out of sight of the terrorists. According to officers on the scene, Golani soldiers and Border Police arrived on the scene and began creating a perimeter around the building. But then a Golani officer in an APC came into the terrorists’ line of fire. Shot dead, his soldiers fired back. One of their bullets struck an explosive charge worn by a terrorist. The explosion set off a chain reaction of all the explosives the terrorists had carried into the building.

  We ran up the stairs to the apartment. A horrific sight greeted us at the door. Sixteen civilians dead, including an entire family around a breakfast table. Two dead Golani soldiers, plus the terrorists.

  Moshe Dayan arrived by helicopter a few minutes after us, and got a briefing on the spot from the commanders on the scene. His questions led to the question of whether the terrorists realized they had given up their escape route the moment they took hostages.

  “Arabs do not commit suicide,” Dayan summed up the conventional thinking after listening to his experts, who explained that the young Arabs probably expected to succeed in their mission.

  “Wait a minute,” I finally spoke up. “I don’t understand,” I said to the group. “Can you imagine a force of IDF soldiers crossing the border, going into an Arab village, taking hostages, and holding negotiations — without preparing any avenue of escape?”

  “Well, us and them, that’s two different things,” someone said. “They have no regard for human lives.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I answered. “But it’s clear that even if they did not want to commit suicide, they fully expected to be sur rounded by the army. They did not plan a retreat. They had nothing to lose. And that gave them unlimited options.” I looked at Dayan, smiling at me with his piercing eye. He nodded at me to continue.

  “With nothing to lose, they were free to kill the hostages, kill the negotiators, kill themselves, anything. I’m telling you, these people went on a suicide mission. And if this is the start of a pattern, we have a much more serious problem than you guys are talking about.” I understood it clearly the moment I saw the remains of the terrorist who wore the booby-trapped explosives.

  Dayan raised an eyebrow, and that evening called me at the rented flat I used in Tel Aviv during the work week, asking me to come visit at his home in Zahala, a suburb north of Tel Aviv. We met occasionally that way, informally. Sometimes I saw him when he visited Nahalal. He loved Nurit, his sister’s daughter, and of late he had been using his influence to get her the best medical treatment for her ailment.

  It was a warm spring evening. We sat on the patio in the back of his house, amidst the antiques that he collected, drinking dark, sweetened tea.

  “Talk to me about what you said this morning,” he asked.

  “Listen, Moshe,” I began. “It’s clear to me that we should treat this as a first, and expect more just like it. We have to come up with some clear doctrine, or we’re going to find ourselves chasing after terrorists on suicide missions. By definition they will be able to surprise us every time they act, since they’ll be ready to take risks that never would occur to us-unless we think like them.”

  “I still do not believe that Arab fighters would agree to suicide missions,” he said.

  “They took a suicidal risk today,” I insisted. “I know what your experts say. The Arabs aren’t brave enough for it.’ But we can’t ignore what happened today, Moshe. They came ready to die. We don’t have a doctrine for it,” I added, “But we’re going to need one.”

  The big army moves slowly, the small army faster, but terrorists on the offensive can be the quickest of all. It took a couple of weeks for an official order to come down from the defense minister’s office, instructing Sayeret Matkal to develop a combat doctrine for hostage situations. Even before the official orders, we began working. But before much could be done, the terrorists struck again.

  MA’ALOT

  On Sunday morning, May 15, 1974, less than a month after the Kiryat Shmona incident, I was on my way to Tel Aviv from Nahalal as usual at six-thirty in the morning. At seven, near Yokne’am, south of Haifa, I heard the radio news:

  “Terrorists holding hostages in a school in Ma’alot,” the broadcast began, “are demanding the release of twenty convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons.” I thumped on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. The announcer continued while I spun the wheel and made a U-turn against traffic, cars screeching to a halt around me. “The army surrounded the school,” said the announcer, “and the government is going into an emergency session.”

  I floored the gas pedal, heading north to the town just south of the Lebanese border, realizing that the Unit had probably tried reaching me just after I left home. I sped north to Ma’alot, cutting the normal hour’s drive to forty minutes.

  Eight kilometers from the Lebanese border, Ma’alot is built on a tree-covered hill. The school was on the northern slopes, a large three-story building overlooking a grove of trees and empty fields. A few hundred yards away
stood a new neighborhood of apartment houses, some under construction, others already inhabited. Driving up toward the school, I saw the first Sikorsky, carrying the Unit, hovering over the football field at the entrance to town, beginning its descent.

  An intelligence colonel from Northern Command gave us a briefing. The terrorists penetrated from Lebanon two days ago, said the colonel. A patrol along the border discovered their tracks about ten kilometers northeast of Ma’alot, and gave chase. After a day of fruitless searching, the general assessment concluded the terrorists had returned to Lebanon, about five kilometers away from where the tracks had disappeared.

  But they did not head back to Lebanon. Instead, they went through the hilly forests and fields along the border, heading west.

  On the second day in Israel the terrorists began to leave a bloody trail. First, they ambushed a van carrying textile workers from the Arab village of Fasuta, killing two of the women on board and wounding the driver, who lost control of the van. It plunged into a wadi beneath the road, injuring the rest of the passengers. By the time a search party found the missing workers at the bottom of the gully, the terrorists were long gone. But instead of retreating, the terrorists wanted more. They reached Ma’alot sometime past midnight. They shot the only person they found on the sleepy town’s streets, a city hall worker named Ya’akov Kadosh, then moved on to the nearest apartment building, finding the Cohen family.

  Fortuna Cohen died clutching her three-year-old son, Edi, also killed by the terrorists. Jojo Cohen, Fortuna’s husband, tried to save their other two children. The terrorists killed Jojo. But their deaf and mute year-old baby survived, apparently because, by not uttering a sound through the entire event, the terrorists missed him.