This convergence of interests begat a secret alliance between the three countries, with the energetic young director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Shimon Peres, playing a leading part in drawing up an ambitious war plan. Israel would invade the Sinai Peninsula, thus giving the French and the British a pretext—a crisis threatening the Suez—to also invade. France promised to provide Israel with an air umbrella against attacks by the Egyptian Air Force.
Shortly before D-Day, Israel’s AMAN learned that a delegation that included the powerful Egyptian chief of staff, Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer, and many other senior officials had left Cairo by plane for Damascus. An opportunity presented itself. With one precision strike, Israel could eliminate nearly the entire Egyptian military leadership.
The air force began conducting intensive training in night interception, a difficult operation, given the technological capabilities available at the time. Ben-Gurion and Dayan decided that Israel would do all it could to conceal its involvement, and try to make it look as if the plane had crashed because of a technical fault.
The mission was code-named Operation Rooster.
The Egyptians were expected to make the short flight from Damascus back to Cairo in two Ilyushin Il-14 aircraft. AMAN assigned the task of identifying and tracking the air convoy to its signals intelligence (SIGINT) unit. The unit (known nowadays as Unit 8200) had already racked up a number of prominent successes in the 1948–49 war, and afterward AMAN invested many resources in the development of the unit, which would eventually become the largest—and, some say, the most important—in the IDF.
The investment proved out. A few days before the delegation left Cairo for Damascus, SIGINT technicians managed to isolate the broadcast frequency the Egyptians were expected to use on the short flight back to Cairo. Twenty Israeli radio operators, all under the age of twenty-five, waited tensely at headquarters in Ramat Hasharon, north of Tel Aviv, manning round-the-clock shifts, waiting for the Egyptians to leave the tarmac in Damascus. The unit was under intense pressure from the high command, as the land invasion of the Sinai Peninsula was planned for October 29, and the demoralizing chaos of losing its entire senior military staff would put the Egyptians at a distinct disadvantage. Time was running out.
Days passed slowly, radio operators patiently waiting for a sound in their headsets. Dawn broke on October 28, the day before zero hour, and still the Egyptians hadn’t left Syria. Finally, at two o’clock on the afternoon of October 28, the signal they were waiting for was picked up: the pilots of the Ilyushin Il-14s were getting ready to leave.
Mattias “Chatto” Birger, commander of the air force’s 119 Squadron and one of the air force’s best pilots at the time, was selected for the dramatic mission. At about 8 P.M., SIGINT informed the air force that only one of the two Egyptian Ilyushins had taken off. Still, SIGINT believed that all of the Egyptian officers were on board. Operation Rooster was a go.
Chatto climbed into the Meteor Mk. 13 jet and took off with his navigator, Elyashiv “Shivi” Brosh. It was a particularly dark night, so dark that even the horizon nearly vanished in the blackness.
Chatto climbed to ten thousand feet and leveled off. The radar pinged off an approaching plane. “Contact, contact, contact!” Shivi said over the intercom. “Two o’clock, our altitude, three miles head-on, moving to three o’clock. Four! Make a hard right! Slower! You’re closing in too fast!”
Against the massive black sky, Chatto saw tiny orange flares, the flames from the Ilyushin’s exhaust pipes. “Eye contact,” he reported to ground control.
“I want a positive identification of the craft,” said air force commander Dan Tolkowsky, who sat in the control center. “Positive, beyond all doubt. Understand?”
Chatto veered slightly to the left until he could see light in the windows of the passenger compartment. The windows of the cockpit were larger than the others. That’s a positive identification, Chatto thought. Only an Ilyushin has windows like that. He also made out people in army uniforms walking among the seats.
“Identification confirmed!” he said.
“Cleared to open fire, only if you have no doubt,” Tolkowsky responded.
“Roger.”
Shells erupted from four twenty-millimeter cannons fitted on the nose of the airplane. Chatto was blinded by an unexpected brilliance: someone on the ground crew, trying to be helpful, had loaded tracer rounds into the cannons, but the bright flashes in the near-total darkness seared his eyes.
Chatto recovered his sight. He saw fire in the sky. “Got him!” Chatto told ground control. “The left engine is in flames, and it looks like there’s a short circuit, because everything is dark.”
Chatto squeezed the trigger again. The Ilyushin exploded, a fireball in the night, spewing flaming chunks of wreckage. It began to spin down toward the sea.
“Did you see it crash?” Tolkowsky asked as Chatto pulled his plane out of the spin.
“Affirmative, crashed,” Chatto answered.
Chatto brought his plane in on fumes and was greeted on the tarmac by chief of staff Moshe Dayan and General Tolkowsky, who gave Chatto the news that, at the last minute, Amer had apparently decided to wait for the second plane.
“If there’s time,” Chatto said, “we’ll fuel up and go out again.”
“We’ve considered that but reached the conclusion that it would look too obvious and would be liable to reveal our intelligence source,” Dayan responded. “We’ve decided to let Amer be. Even so, the minute you liquidated the Egyptian General Staff, you won half the war. Let’s have a drink for the second half.”
Operation Rooster was without doubt a superb intelligence and aerial warfare achievement. Indeed, the participants in Operation Rooster later began calling it “the downing of the Egyptian General Staff” and would claim that the chaos that prevailed in the high command in Cairo had contributed significantly to Israel’s victory in the war that broke out the next day.
Whether or not the impact was quite as large as these men claimed, the IDF would go on to easily rout the Egyptian Army. It put the world on notice: The Jewish state was now a serious fighting force. Ben-Gurion, temporarily in a state of euphoria, sent a public letter to the officers and soldiers of the 9th Brigade talking about the “Third Kingdom of Israel.”
—
TOGETHER WITH THE SINAI Peninsula, Israel had also conquered the Gaza Strip. After the IDF occupied the Strip, Rehavia Vardi sent some of his men from Unit 504 to search the Egyptian intelligence building in Gaza City, where Mustafa Hafez had been killed a few months before. In a cellar they found a hidden treasure, one that the desperately fleeing Egyptians had neglected to destroy: the intact card file of all the Palestinian terrorists that Hafez and his men had deployed against Israel in the five years preceding the Sinai Campaign.
It was as if the Egyptians had left a hit list. Vardi met with chief of staff Dayan and asked for his permission to begin killing the Palestinians named in the card file. Dayan, in turn, received Ben-Gurion’s approval. Vardi then ordered Natan Rotberg—and his vat of explosives—to go into overdrive.
Rotberg’s special formula was poured into wicker baskets, cigarette lighters, fruits, vegetables, even pieces of furniture. Unit 504’s Arab agents concealed the bombs in appropriate places or passed them on as gifts to as many as thirty Palestinian fedayeen in Gaza. Between November 1957 and March 1958, Vardi’s men worked through the file, eliminating men who’d terrorized Israelis for years. The targeted killing missions were largely a success, tactically speaking, but not necessarily strategically. “All these eliminations were of very limited importance,” Rotberg said, “because others simply took their place.”
Very quickly, the secret conspiracy by Britain, France, and Israel turned into a resounding international diplomatic disaster. The United States forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza. France and Britain also caved in and
finally lost control of the canal, and the leaders of both of those superpowers were forced to resign.
The Egyptian regime was now seen as having stood up to meddling Western colonialism, and having forced two great European powers and its sworn Jewish enemy to stand down. Nasser was cast as a hero and became, for all practical purposes, the leader of the Arab world.
Nasser did, however, agree to allow Israeli ships to use the canal, and to stop sponsoring fedayeen operations in Gaza. He grasped that the potential for a general military flare-up with Israel from these operations was greater than the advantages to be derived from them.
Finally, in 1957, it seemed that terror would stop streaming into Israel from across the border.
—
THE SINAI CAMPAIGN MADE it clear to the Arab states that destroying Israel would be very difficult, and it gave Israel eleven years of freedom from large-scale warfare, up until the Six-Day War of 1967. The IDF used this time to morph into a powerful, large, well-trained, technology-based military force, equipped with modern weapons and boasting an intelligence arm, AMAN, with extensive capabilities.
The years that followed were also good years for the Mossad. Isser Harel had nurtured it from a fledgling, sometimes stumbling organization into an agency of close to a thousand employees, renowned internationally for its toughness, tenacity, and enterprise.
Israel had begun to emerge as an intelligence power in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in which he spoke frankly about the crimes committed by his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. Every spy outfit in the Western world was anxious to obtain the text, to study it for clues to Khrushchev’s mindset, but none of them could penetrate the Soviet Union’s iron veil of secrecy. It was Israeli intelligence that succeeded, and Isser Harel ordered that a copy of the speech be handed to the CIA.
The agency’s impressed and grateful director, Allen Dulles, passed it on to President Dwight Eisenhower, who then ordered that it be leaked to The New York Times. The publication stirred up a global storm and greatly embarrassed the Soviet Union.
The secret alliance between American and Israeli intelligence was born. On the American side, it was led by James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, a supporter of Israel who, like Harel, saw a Soviet spy under every bed. Through this channel, the CIA would obtain a great deal of Middle East intelligence, a practice that continues to this day.
Israel’s Sinai Campaign of 1956, though a political disaster, further cemented the country’s standing in intelligence operations. In the wake of that brief war, Harel began weaving a network of secret contacts within countries all over the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, including many that publicly sided with Arabs. This modus operandi was known in the Mossad as “the periphery doctrine,” and it called for the establishment of covert links with countries and organizations that lay just outside the ring of hostile Arab states surrounding Israel, or with minorities inside those states who were at conflict with Israel’s adversaries.
The outstanding achievement of the Mossad’s periphery strategy was a tripartite intelligence alliance—code-named Trident—between Israel, the shah’s Iran, and Turkey. The heads of the three countries’ spy agencies would meet from time to time and exchange large amounts of intelligence material. The alliance also carried out joint operations against the Soviets and the Arabs. Ben-Gurion persuaded President Eisenhower that Trident was a top-class asset, and the CIA provided funds for its activities.
The biggest coup for the Mossad, however, came in 1960, when Israeli operatives tracked Adolf Eichmann—one of the main architects and facilitators of Hitler’s Final Solution—to Buenos Aires, where he’d been living for ten years under the name Ricardo Klement.
A German Jewish prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, despaired of the chances of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice in Germany, so instead he leaked information that he had gathered about Eichmann to the Mossad. When a Mossad official came to see him, Bauer left him alone, with the classified documents lying on the desktop. The Israeli understood the hint and copied the relevant details.
Ben-Gurion authorized Harel to go to Buenos Aires, at the head of a large team. The premier was determined to settle accounts with Eichmann, who was given the code name Dybbuk, from the Hebrew word for an evil spirit that takes hold of a living person. But the aim of the operation was far greater than wreaking vengeance upon an individual, however egregious his transgressions may have been. Ben-Gurion ordered Harel and his team not to physically harm Eichmann, although killing him would have been the easiest option, but instead to kidnap him and bring him to face trial in Israel. The goal was to stir an internationally resonant awareness and ineradicable memory of the Holocaust, via exposure of the acts of one of its chief perpetrators.
Dozens of Mossad operatives and collaborators took part in the operation, some of them carrying and switching passports of up to five nations. They spread out into a number of safe houses all over the Argentinean capital.
On May 11, the team positioned itself near the stop where the man known as Klement got off the bus every evening at 7:40 and walked a short distance to his home. On this evening, the bus came, but Eichmann did not appear. The team’s orders were to wait until no later than 8 P.M. and, if he did not appear by then, to abort, so as not to arouse suspicion.
At eight, they were preparing to pack it up, but Rafi Eitan, commander on the field, decided to wait a little longer. Five minutes later, when Eitan was about to give up for the night, another bus stopped. Klement descended and began walking, one hand in his pocket.
Zvi Malchin was the first to pounce. He feared that Klement suspected something and was about to draw a gun, so instead of grabbing him from behind and dragging him to the car, as planned, he pushed him from behind into a ditch and jumped on top of him, with Eitan and another operative close behind. Klement yelled, but there was no one around to hear him. Within seconds, he was overpowered and tossed into the backseat of a car. Zvi Aharoni, a Mossad operative, who was sitting there, told him in German that if he made trouble he would be shot on the spot.
Eitan began looking for marks that would indicate beyond doubt that he was indeed Eichmann. The scar under his arm, where the SS tattoo had been, was easily located. The scar of an appendectomy that he had undergone, meticulously documented in his SS file, was more of a problem. Eitan had to open his belt and shove his hand under Klement’s trousers, all while the car was roaring ahead and the passengers were being jolted from side to side. But he eventually found it and exclaimed, “Zeh hoo! Zeh hoo!”—Hebrew for “It’s him! It’s him!”
In the dark, Eitan and Malchin’s eyes were shining. They shook hands and hummed a few bars of the Partisans’ Song, which had been written in honor of the Jews who had fought the Nazis in the forests, and ends with the line “Our march beats out the message: We are here.”
Eichmann was sedated and smuggled to Israel in an El Al plane. His trial in Jerusalem attracted unprecedented international attention, and the procession of witnesses reminded the world of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed by hanging. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.
Meanwhile, the skimpy news release about Eichmann’s discovery and abduction had given the Mossad the standing of a ruthless and capable espionage agency. By mid-1962, Harel was considered the strongman of the Israeli intelligence and defense establishments.
Ben-Gurion had gotten everything he’d hoped for.
But for all that glory, Harel’s agency had completely missed a devastating threat developing right next door.
ON THE MORNING OF July 21, 1962, Israelis woke up to their worst nightmare: Egypt’s newspapers reported the successful test launch of four surface-to-surface missiles—two of the new Al-Zafer (the Victor) model and two of the Al-Qaher (the Conqueror) model. Two days later, the missiles—ten of each
type, draped with the Egyptian flag—were paraded through Cairo along the Nile River. Some three hundred foreign diplomats were among the spectators, as were many of the residents of Cairo. President Nasser himself reviewed the parade from a special stand before a government building near the Nile. He proudly declared that the Egyptian military was now capable of hitting any point “south of Beirut.” Given that the entire territory of Israel lay between Egypt, to its south, and Lebanon, with Beirut as its capital, to the north, the implication was clear.
The next day, a broadcast delivered in Hebrew from Egypt-based radio station “The Voice of Thunder from Cairo” was even more explicit. “These missiles are intended to open the gates of freedom for the Arabs, to retake the homeland that was stolen as part of imperialist and Zionist plots,” the anchorman boasted.
The Israeli public’s deep unease was only magnified when, just a few weeks later, it became clear that a team of German scientists had played an integral role in developing these missiles. World War II had ended only seventeen years earlier, and suddenly the traumas of the Holocaust, suffused as they were with images of German scientists in Wehrmacht uniforms, gave way to a new and different existential threat: weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Israel’s new great enemy, Nasser, whom Israelis regarded as the Hitler of the Middle East. “Former German Nazis are now helping Nasser in his anti-Israeli genocide projects” was the news described by the Jewish press.
And the Mossad, despite its sweeping charter to monitor and protect Israel from external threats, had been caught unaware. The Jewish nation’s intelligence services—to say nothing of its political and military leaders—had been stunned to learn of Egypt’s missile project mere days before the test launch. It was a devastating reminder of the little country’s vulnerability and a humiliating failure for Harel’s Mossad.
Rise and Kill First Page 8
