Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  I pressed my transmit button and commanded, “Belay that order! Everybody continue your turn—and shoot them down!”

  WHEN I SAID THAT OVER THE RADIO, it was clearly an offense against air force discipline. And not just an offense; this was real insolence. The voice of the controller is the voice of the air force commander, and usually the air force commander is sitting behind the man with the mike. I had no doubt that they all heard my answer and had recorded it, and I was going to hear about it—not that I had any intention of disowning what I had said. But this was my moment. Not that I wanted to violate orders—definitely not—but I was a commander and leading my men in battle, and I knew what was right and what was wrong. After the last hard month I got it all clear; I was not asking anybody for authority to do my job. The responsibility was mine, no matter what happened. I took over.

  NOBODY ARGUED, AND THINGS lined up like clockwork, tick-tock every ten seconds. First Baharav announced a kill. Then Hertz closed on his MiG and chopped it to pieces while I was guarding him from above and watching the incoming new enemies. I put him on my wing, and we received the four new MiGs in a well-organized formation as they came and streaked between us head-on at ultrahigh speed and passed far to the east, tearing themselves apart and churning the air in an effort to turn back to us. I really felt Hassan sighing under the high g-turn while he tried to keep eye contact with us while maneuvering to avoid colliding with his wingman. I even grinned wickedly to myself.

  Then the fourth MiG crashed into the ground with Baharav on his tail, and the circle was completed. Sharon and Baharav were on our right-hand side, climbing to re-form the four-ship division, all facing east at the new MiGs, pressing them to the canal.

  “Eye contact?” I asked.

  “Eye contact.”

  “Full power.”

  Our voices were calm. We were spread aside in a wide formation of two fighting pairs, heading east, and before us the four new MiGs, weary and confused, with no energy. We could start a new dogfight, the conditions were perfect, but there is a limit to arrogance.

  “Aborting battle.”

  We passed among them face-to-face and continued home, leaving Hassan to collect his buddies and hurry to return to his airfield at Inshas, not to miss his friends’ funerals. This was the most beautiful dogfight of my life.

  ON THE GROUND I GOT a phone call. Colonel Somekh, the likable deputy of the air force commander, had been following the battle. He listened to my explanation and accepted it, even laughed, and I heard he liked telling the story of how I had refused an abort-battle order. I took note of that.

  A week later we were ordered to get a formation together for a similar operation. This time I appointed my deputy, Sharon, as division leader. Before he went out, the air force commander called. He asked me to lead the formation myself.

  “Sir,” I told him, “I am developing Sharon.”

  “This is not high school,” General Hod said. “Remove him and get out there yourself.”

  “Moti, I trust him.”

  “For me he is not good enough yet.”

  I breathed deeply and said, “Okay, I’ll do it. But when I get back, I’ll wash Sharon out of the First.”

  After a silence Moti said, “Do what you want, then.” Sharon led the division for the mission and brought back good results.

  I WAS PRACTICING disobedience.

  The rules of my life began to formulate inside me, for now in secrecy and soon loud and clear: You, the operational commander, are responsible to all. An order is just an instruction; its aim is more important than learning its details by heart. You know? So act according to what you know. You already received authority. Don’t ask for it again—don’t roll the responsibility back to your superiors. You don’t need permission to do your job. Blind obedience does not relieve you of responsibility for the results, because a nondecision is a decision in itself. What did they make you an officer for, if not to change the orders when they are inappropriate in your view?

  And what about guilt? Who knows? Anyway, it shall be determined only after trial. And who shall try you if not you, and who can punish harder than you, yourself?

  WITH A CERTAIN LACK of intellectual integrity, I demanded iron discipline from my subordinates. In the dogfight I described above, Baharav launched his missiles in a way totally contrary to the instructions I had dictated. Both missed. I called him to my room.

  “But Spector, both my missiles were Atolls! No Atoll has ever hit a target!”

  I admitted he was right, but an offense is an offense. If you were out of the envelope, you were not allowed to launch. And so Baharav, with two additional MiGs to his credit, packed his things with a sour puss and left the squadron. With him went another young pilot who lost eye contact with his leader on the way to battle. Both were exceptionally good pilots, but I demanded discipline.

  On the next day in a training dogfight, I scolded Slapak for some flying offense. Immediately an answer came on the radio, “No problem; wash me out, too.”

  I understood I had passed the limit, and soon I might be flying out here alone.

  Chapter

  14

  Challenge

  SAM (surface-to-air missile): weapon in a missile system designed for defense against aircraft. This defense doctrine was prevalent mainly in the Soviet Union and its protégés. In the seventies the most common systems were the Soviet SAM-2 and SAM-3. The West produced the American Hawk and the French Crotale SAM systems.

  The basic unit of a SAM system is the battery, which has three main components: the fire-management center with a radar, which should detect and follow the target; the launchers (usually four to six); and the missiles. The missile carries sensors that enable it to home on the target aircraft and detonate close to it.

  A SAM battery is a big ground unit, and it defends itself also with antiaircraft guns. A SAM division commands several batteries.

  JULY 1970 WAS ONE OF THOSE months when joy and sadness mingled. It went so fast and was so condensed that one thing overlapped the next. That month, my story and the story of Lt. Col. Sam Khetz, the commander of the Falcons, interlocked and separated like wires in a cable till they finally separated forever.

  ‡

  MY INSISTENCE THAT MY PILOTS aim their missiles accurately was definitely the way to go. But there also had been merit in Baharav’s defense: the missiles he was given to do his job were worthless. We all knew it.

  I went with Khetz to see the new air-to-air missiles his Phantoms had just received from America. They were heat-seeking rockets, keying on the opponent aircraft’s exhaust pipe. The Americans dubbed them AIM-9D, and their Hebrew code name was Dagger. I loved them. They looked so brand-new and shiny, unlike the scratched and peeling tubes we were carrying. Their noses were pointed, and carried a small, glassy sensor looking for prey like a gray evil eye.

  Then, when we sat down to dinner at his home, Khetz opened the technical manual and showed me the specs of that missile, and my eyes widened. The launch envelope was enormous. This missile could be launched at a MiG from unbelievable distances and wide-off angles. It was exactly what we needed. I asked Khetz to lend me a few of those beauties.

  Khetz grinned.

  “You are as innocent as a child,” he told me. “Adaptation of a new weapon to an aircraft is not a simple thing. There are procedures, and if you don’t do every step exactly right you will have serious problems. Would you mount a truck wheel on your Sussita car?” he asked me.

  “Well, if I were stuck with four flat tires,” I tried. Khetz laughed but refused my request. My idea was stupid anyway, and besides, his squadron was short of missiles, too.

  But I was already fired up. As I came out of Khetz’s house, I turned and went directly to Yak’s. The commander of Hatzor listened to me pensively and aloofly. Eventually he took his pipe out of his mouth and assumed a noncommittal position. If I wish to work on it myself, he would not stand in my way. That was all I got. Yak was already in his last days on thi
s duty, and he wouldn’t get involved in dubious things. In general, he became a different Yak than the one who ten years ago accepted me into the Super Mysteres. Many years later I recalled that meeting in his house. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps Yak’s personal deterioration was already on its way then.

  ‡

  SO, I THOUGHT, THIS IS ABOUT ordnance? Good. Let’s see what the ordnance people at headquarters have to say. I called them.

  Major Sapir, heavy and perspiring, arrived from Tel Aviv and sat in front of me. I presented him with my idea. Still it seemed to me very simple: let’s take a few missiles from the Phantoms—not too many—and put them on our Mirages.

  “Can you imagine the tactical revolution?”

  “It’s not a good idea!” he said immediately. First, the Dagger was too heavy for the thin wing of the Mirage. Second, the impact of jettisoning external fuel tanks—the usual thing we all did before going into battle—would shake and surely break the missile’s sensor. When I twisted my mouth he told me that the Phantom didn’t have such a problem; it was a much heavier aircraft and didn’t shake in the air. And there was a third argument: “Do you have any idea of how expensive this missile is? A hundred thousand U.S. dollars!” Three arguments, indeed!

  Although the money didn’t mean anything to me, I made out that I was seriously impressed, so that Sapir could see I was a logical person. Then, when coffee was served, I got after him again.

  “We both have been familiar with the wing of the Mirage for some time,” I told Sapir, “and the Dagger looks to me like a pretty tough piece of pipe, too. I don’t see any of them breaking in the air. As to the sensor, if the cow-eyed missiles we currently carry don’t, why should the Dagger’s eye break?”

  I saw his engineer’s face sour and hurried to add: “I promise you we’ll drop our tanks very carefully.”

  I was deeply suspicious that all his technical arguments had been prepared on the way from Tel Aviv, and the only reason for refusing my idea was stinginess. Was the Dagger expensive? And what was the cost of a Mirage and its pilot going into battle with improper ordnance?

  But Sapir shook his head and got up to leave. I understood that I hadn’t passed the first test. But there was a war raging outside, and all we had were shitty missiles that even the sternest discipline couldn’t convince to hit anything. And within two weeks we were going to be on alert in Refidim. Gnashing my teeth secretly, I set myself a goal: we would do the Refidim alert with Daggers on our wings. But how?

  ‡

  THE WAY TO CIRCUMVENT the system revealed itself, and amazingly it was that same Sapir, the engineer from headquarters, who in the same meeting presented me unintentionally with the solution. Sapir needed four Mirage sorties to flight-test a new pylon they invented in his department. The other Mirage squadrons, up to their necks in work, already turned him down. This was normal in the air force of the 1970s; headquarters had no aircraft for flight testing and had to use the fighter squadrons for tests. Sapir was a nice person, and he preferred to be considerate; he knew how hard we were working. He didn’t want to order us to do it.

  “Perhaps the First might agree to do the tests for us?”

  “For you, sure,” I fawned sweetly, grasping on the spot what a gift I was being given.

  I SPENT ALL THAT EVENING at Khetz’s home. The next morning, when Sapir’s engineers arrived to hang their new pylon under the belly of one of my Mirages, a cart stood near the aircraft with one Dagger missile on it.

  “When you are done with the pylon, hang this thing too,” my technical officer requested.

  They checked their paperwork. “We don’t have any orders on this missile.”

  “That’s just a local check we do here. Here are the missile’s technical manuals.” Engineers love technical manuals.

  After some hours of work, the way to hang a Dagger on a Mirage and connect it to the wiring was found. Only then the most senior engineer looked up, and a spark of intelligence shone in his eye. “Is this okay, that’s… say, what’s the hell is going on here?”

  “It’s okay,” he was told hesitantly. While they were arguing about it, over their heads in the cockpit Epstein was already being strapped in.

  “I am informing headquarters!”

  “Sure, go right ahead.”

  In the meantime, we acted. We had a test order, four flights to do, and we had no time to waste. The new pylon had to be checked. While the senior engineer was trying to get his phone connection, Mirage No. 15 was already breaking the speed of sound at fifty thousand feet, and checking the robustness of his new pylon in sharp rolls and turns. After twenty minutes he landed. We all gathered around anxiously, waiting for him. The wing was still there, safe and sound, and so was the Dagger—small evil eye and all.

  In the evening everybody came to Hatzor. The whole ordnance department left Tel Aviv and came in cars and trucks. Sapir was there, and Dekel, his superior, and even Lt. Col. Joe Aretz himself, the tough head of the department. Fearing what was surely coming for my head I hurried to summon Yak, and as a further defense armed my office with cake from the base kitchen.

  A heated exchange broke out. Joe Aretz stabbed me with his spectacles like two white-hot rods of steel. “Where did this chutzpah come from?” he wanted to know, and, “I want to know from whom you stole that missile! Huh?”

  But in front of us—I made sure my office’s door remained wide opened all the time—Mirage No. 15 stood in silence in the parking lot, carrying the Dagger on its wing, complete and shining. And this is what changed the course of the discussion. After all, we were in a war, and we all were air force men.

  After an hour of heated exchanges, things calmed down. Joe gave us permission to continue “the testing of the pylon.” Before he got up to go home, I squeezed out of him acknowledgment that the testing included weapons firing. This, of course, was written into the pylon testing order. Nobody mentioned “missile” or “Dagger,” but it was all clear. At the door he retorted, “We’ll see what will come out of this.”

  “Joe,” I promised him, “this will be a great success!”

  “I am really moved,” he said ironically. “But let’s be clear, Major Spector, this is only a test, nothing more. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You will not get Daggers for your squadron!”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “And no matter what comes out in the tests, don’t even think of taking a Dagger operational! You don’t have permission!”

  “Right, sir.”

  This was mid-July 1970, and things were coming to a boil.

  ‡

  BOTH KHETZ AND I WERE CALLED to air force headquarters for a special briefing. Some important operation was cooking. Khetz invited me to drive there with him, so as I landed he was waiting to pick me up at the aircraft. He drove his car to Tel Aviv in uniform, and I sat beside him in my sweaty flight suit.

  A different crowd was gathered in the barracks that served as a briefing hall. In the first row, near the air force commander sat Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan. This was unusual. In the middle rows sat an odd mix of uniformed personnel I had never seen before, and quite a number in civilian clothes. We, the few invited squadron commanders, sat in the back rows, as usual. It was our habit, from the old days of being the “opposition.”

  Looking at the strange people, I elbowed Khetz.

  “EW,” he answered me obscurely, whispering.

  “EW what?”

  “Electrons,” he shut me up, left me, and went to sit in the front, among the VIPs. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Colonel Agassi, the chief of operations, finally took the podium. Silence fell; the air was thick. Agassi presented us with the operation, code-named Challenge. The part that involved me and my Mirages was nothing; just a four-ship formation patrolling along the Suez Canal to prevent interference by MiGs.

  “First, clear?”

  “Clear,” I answered. From now on I was free to listen to the crux o
f the program. It was a large operation to attack the Egyptian SAM array that lay beyond the Suez Canal, on the way up to Cairo. It was a huge array, with many missile batteries, gun points, and radar installations woven into a complete unit. A giant antiaircraft fortress.

  Then my mouth fell open. The plan Agassi presented was so weird, and so different from anything I ever imagined, that I couldn’t believe my eyes. An armada of Phantoms, flying formation at high level, was to cross the canal and fly directly into the SAM array. I couldn’t understand their flight profile. The Phantoms were supposed to fly in large formations directly at the missiles at high altitude in straight and level flight. This was nuts. The enemy batteries would be given optimal conditions, conditions that every Egyptian missile man could only dream about.

  I rubbed my eyes. “What is this for, the Independence Day parade?” “Husshh!” whispers came from all around. If the atmosphere hadn’t been so serious, and the people around so tense and somber, and the minister of defense in the audience, I would have thought somebody was pulling our legs. The proposed plan looked to me like a bad joke.

  The tactics I was brought up on were that one should penetrate areas of missile danger at low altitude, close to the ground, and at maximum speed. Surprise the enemy like lightning. Approach clandestinely and indirectly, hit the target, and get out of there as fast as possible. The flocks of geese on the blackboard were cruising calmly, directly into the heart of the missile killing zone. This approach contradicted anything I had known.