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

by Moshe Betser

  But far more important than what I learned in the course, I met Uri Simhoni, one of the instructors and commander-designate for Sayeret Egoz, the Northern Command’s new special operations and reconnaissance force. Uri wanted me as a staff officer for Egoz, which was then spearheading operations against the PLO in Lebanon, where their terrorists had established themselves after being evicted from Jordan.

  That same month in 1970, King Hussein of Jordan finally took action against the PLO’s state-within-a-state in the Jordan Rift and in the Palestinian refugee camps around Amman. The showdown between Hussein and Arafat turned into a month-long bloody civil war. Called Black September, the 1970 civil war in Jordan ended with the PLO’s eviction from the Hashemite kingdom.

  But it did not put an end to PLO attacks on Israeli settlements and roads. Taking advantage of Lebanon’s relatively free political climate, Arafat moved his organization to Beirut from Jordan, and quickly established an armed presence in southern Lebanon, right over the border from Israel.

  Instead of infiltrating across the Jordan River, the PLO cells came across the mountainous border in the north on their way to terror attacks in the villages and towns of the Galilee. As Northern Command’s sayeret, Egoz was another tip of the spear in the fight against those incursions.

  But I would not give up my dreams of Africa. “I appreciate the offer,” I told Uri, “but I’m scheduled for a course in six months, and then two years in Africa. I can’t commit to anything longer than six months.”

  He considered the problem — and came up with a solution. “I’ll give you the reconnaissance company,” he suggested, “and a free hand to train them as you see fit.”

  It would work, I realized. A sayeret’s reconnaissance company trains new recruits. A six-month course in Egoz dovetailed perfectly with Yitzhak Bar-On’s schedule for me. But I wanted something more from Uri.

  “What?” Uri asked. “You’ll be a staff officer. I’ll give you a secretary, a car, what else do you want?”

  “If there’s an operation,” I told Uri, “I’m in. No matter what.” I needed the action. I knew it from the moment I began recuperating after Karameh. I wanted to know if Karameh ruined the psychological mechanism that enables every soldier to go into battle with the feeling that it can’t happen to him.

  I had spent a year and a half flying around the world as an El Al marshal, looking for action, but never getting the chance to find out if psychologically I survived Karameh. With Yasser Arafat and his Fatah, the largest of the organizations in the PLO, taking over southern Lebanon, my being with Egoz would put me back in the thick of things.

  I did not have to explain any of that to Uri. He promised me a place in any operation Egoz planned.

  So, in October 1970, I went straight from the company commanders’ course to Egoz. My officers and soldiers arrived a few days after I started. As soon as they got off the bus we put them in formation for an eighty-kilometer march, warning them that by the end of the course, half would be gone, sent to other, less demanding units than the Northern Command’s sayeret.

  I drew on all my experience — from the paratroops sayeret, from Shaked, the war, and Karameh — to turn the Egoz training course into one of the toughest and smartest in the IDF.

  The recruits were the best the sergeants and officers at Tel Hashomer’s induction center could find. But the Northern Command’s mountainous purview includes some of the toughest terrain our soldiers faced. Physical strength and coordination are important. Mental strength makes the difference. Teamwork, drive, ambition, willpower — these are basic elements.

  But I wanted more, I warned them as we set off to trace the length of the mountainous border with Lebanon all the way to Mount Hermon, in the northeast. I wanted the truth. Honesty is the source of reliability, the basic precondition for membership in a sayeret under my command.

  COMBAT-FIT

  The action I wanted more than anything else came in early 1971, in the heart of a small town in southern Lebanon called el-Hiam, where my father once battled alongside Moshe Dayan in the days of the Palmach.

  Field security prevented any mention of the operation to my father. A few days before the operation, I dropped by to see him at Bet She’arim, twenty minutes from the base. As usual, we did not speak much that afternoon. In my green fatigues and combat boots, I helped him load a trailer with bales of hay. I did not tell him that in a few days I would face enemy bullets again. But he understood why I wanted to be in Egoz that winter. “Take care of yourself,” he said as we parted.

  By the beginning of 1971, the PLO presence gave southeast Lebanon a new name — Fatahland, named for Arafat’s organization, the largest of the PLO’s groups. His irregulars used the hilly, rocky terrain as a launching ground for terror attacks against Israeli settlements on the border. Arafat learned an important lesson at Karameh — to spread out his forces, instead of concentrating them in one place. Throughout the towns and villages of Fatahland, the PLO-without any interference from the Lebanese government-established an armed presence. From Mount Hermon, in the east, all the way to the Mediterranean, they used southern Lebanon as a safe haven for their hit-and-run attacks across the border.

  Terrorists strike where people least expect to be harmed — on a public bus, in a movie theater, shopping in the market, at work in an orchard picking apples. Beating terrorism means putting them on the run, keeping them off-balance, making them fear the places where they feel safest-in short, giving them a taste of their own medicine. No air attack heard coming from afar could be as damaging to the spirit as a face-to-face encounter with combat-proficient soldiers on their own doorstep.

  Dusk falls quickly in the mountains. On the last day of January 1971, just as the sun disappeared in the west but even before the purpling sky turned black, thirty-five Egoz soldiers moved quietly across the border near Kibbutz Dan, heading to a little house in the center of el-Hiam.

  Uri kept his promise to me, giving me the number-two slot in the five-man force that would make the final assault on the doorstep of Fatah’s regional command headquarters for the area north of Metulla, our northernmost town. Again I would be at the tip of the spear.

  We kept to a grueling pace to meet the schedule-five hours through the cold, damp mountains to the outskirts of town, then another two hours of quiet movement in ones and twos from shadow to shadow, through el-Hiam to reach the target without detection.

  As we drew closer to the target, squads broke off from the formation, taking up flanking positions to safeguard the heart of the operation-the attack-and protect the route of our retreat.

  Just as the aerial intelligence maps promised, a small rise overlooked the house from the northeast. The last of the forces broke off to take up a position on the rise. Led by Moshe Kafri, Uri’s deputy, the force carried machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades that would soften up the target before the final assault by the five-man team Uri selected for the attack.

  Seven of us crept into a small clump of bushes at the edge of a small grove beside the single-story house. Uri Simhoni and one of his staff officers, Baruch, would stay behind while the final five made the last approach. Baruch carried infrared binoculars.

  I crawled into position, scanning the dark house and the yard around it. “Uri,” I whispered. “I can see the guard. He’s sitting on the tractor.” Less than twenty meters away, easy for me to take out with my silenced Uzi, the guard sat in the driver’s seat of the tractor, a Kalashnikov on his lap.

  “He’s right,” Baruch said softly, peering through the cumbersome binoculars at the guard. “And he’s got a Klatch,” Baruch added, using the nickname we gave to the Kalashnikov.

  Military Intelligence had warned we might find two guards on the job. But none of us spotted anyone else in the yard or its surroundings.

  Three clicks on the radio — Moshe Kafri reporting his troops had reached their position-snapped softly over the speaker. The guard took a drag of his cigarette.

  “Uri,” I whisp
ered again. “I’ll crawl over and finish him off quietly.”

  “Wait,” he murmured back.

  “Uri, I can get closer,” I pleaded. “Let me get closer and I’ll finish him off.”

  “We’ll wait a little while longer.” Uri decided.

  Too late. The guard flicked away the last of his cigarette, stretched, and then climbed down from the tractor, walking to the house and up the stairs to the porch, disappearing into the building.

  Finally, Uri gave the order, first signaling us to get ready to run down the lane to the house; then, clicking the walkie-talkie mike, he signaled Kafri to begin.

  Bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades, and the heavy fire from machine guns slammed into the house. The fire slashed through wood-and-iron shutters, shattering the glass. The shooting went on for a long full minute. Then there was silence. Uri gave us the nod, and we started the sprint to the house down a narrow lane between bushes into the yard. The narrow lane forced us into a column.

  David Agmon, the senior company commander in Egoz, went first. I followed, with Dubi Adar, Michael Sofer, and Udi Kain, three junior officers, behind me. Since we ran in a column, only David Agmon had a clear shot as we sprinted. He let off a burst and then paused, his weapon jammed.

  I passed him without stopping, spraying short bursts toward the porch as I ran into the yard, the other four fighters behind me.

  Suddenly, from the porch five meters ahead a spray of tracer fire burst out of a Kalashnikov, directly at us. I ran on, into the enemy’s flashing fire, my Uzi spewing its own bullets at the Fatah fighter on the porch. A bullet caught him in the chest, hurling him backward against the wall. He slid down, giving me time to reach the wall beneath the porch.

  But his Kalashnikov continued firing into the darkness. I pulled a grenade from my web-belt, plucked out the pin, and tossed it over my head onto the porch. Three seconds went by before the grenade’s blast silenced the enemy gun. Only then did I turn to look around behind me.

  The four other fighters in my group lay on the ground behind me, each wounded in his own way. I used the radio to report on the wounded, then sprinted to the nearest window, tossing two grenades inside. But even before they exploded Michael Sofer appeared by my side. “It was only a crease,” he said of the blood trickling down from his forehead, then added one of his own grenades. We took cover leaning side by side against the wall under the window, tensed while we waited for the explosions.

  Barely seconds had passed since the shooting stopped, but already the unit doctor was at work on Dubi, trying to save his life under the blurry light of a flashlight. But the young lieutenant died. The bullets had smashed Agmon’s wrist and destroyed Udi Kain’s foot from the ankle down.

  Each of us carried a Gur device, a powerful explosive charge that can be clamped to a wall. While the medics treated the wounded, I cut loose the four Gurs they carried and assigned a couple of soldiers who came running down from Kafri’s position to set them just as we had planned. Finally, with the wounded on their way out on the stretchers, I gave the order to set the detonators. The seventeen and a half seconds gave us plenty of time to find cover from the flying debris. We wanted to go back after the explosion to assess the damage. But headquarters told Uri not to take any more chances.

  So we headed home, slowed down by a stretcher carrying the crippled Udi and a second carrying Dubi’s body. Just before dawn, we finally found a safe field for a medevac chopper to come in and take our wounded. A few hours later, we crossed the border on foot at Kibbutz Dan.

  Setting out for battle takes a leap of faith to believe you will survive combat. Every soldier who has been through a firefight knows this psychological mechanism. But after Karameh, I could not be sure that I could still make that leap of faith. Until el-Hiam.

  When the shooting started, I kept going. When Agmon’s Uzi jammed, I had kept up the assault, running forward into the fire. I had made the leap of faith; I did not flinch. The psychological mechanism still worked.

  Yet, despite my personal accomplishment as a soldier and the strategic value of the attack, the mission took a very high price. An officer dead and two wounded is a painful price for a small unit, a small army, a small country.

  Nonetheless, our operation, and others like it through the seventies, put pressure on the PLO, making them feel vulnerable deep in their heartland. We struck where they felt safest — at home, on their doorstep. It put them on the defensive, forcing them to protect themselves rather than plot more terror against our people.

  Keep terrorists on the run, is the rule. It might make them harder to find, but it preoccupies them with their own safety rather than plotting their crimes.

  Military Intelligence was never certain about precisely how many died inside the Fatah house in el-Hiam. Vague reports from the Lebanese press reported two or three dead. We took comfort in the fact that Fatah shut down that headquarters, moving further north, away from the border and our settlements.

  As for me, like a rider getting back on after a horse had thrown him, my performance in el-Hiam proved that Karameh did not break my combat spirit.

  RED SKIES OVER JINJA

  Before the Six-Day War, Israelis taught farming in countries throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. After the Six-Day War, those countries still unaligned with the Arabs or the Soviet Union wanted our military aid.

  Africa appealed to me for personal reasons. I wanted to drive and hike into its primordial past. I felt an invisible vibration under the huge skies of the continent, and fell in love with the simplicity and mystery of the place. The pure state of nature interested me, not geopolitics. Luckily, my personal interest coincided with the state’s, which wanted Africa as a market for exports and political influence.

  The Israeli delegations going out still included civilians from institutions like Solel Boneh, Mekorot, and other Israeli companies that won civil engineering contracts in Africa. But the new countries in post-colonialist Africa wanted armies, and the IDF’s reputation after the Six-Day War made us their first choice.

  The Ministry of Defense and Foreign Ministry ran a joint six-month course for official aid delegations. Field at Beit Berl, the Labor party’s college campus north of Tel Aviv, the courses covered language training and regional issues ranging from geography to tribal cultures. I knew just enough English to get in and out of foreign countries as a reticent air marshal. Now I needed enough to teach a course in topography to African officers.

  Along with the histories of the major tribes of central Africa and the political economies of the states where Israeli military delegations served, they also taught us proper behavior at cocktail parties and official dinners. As I rarely drink alcohol, I learned to nurse a single glass of wine for toasts and to ask for soda water instead of whiskey.

  Halfway through the course, hot news came from Africa. The Ugandan deputy chief of staff had pulled off a coup, becoming chief of staff and head of state. As a graduate of an IDF paratroops course, Idi Amin, the new Ugandan president, referred to Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan as his idols, keeping pictures of them on his desk. Amin is our friend, said the experts from the Foreign and Defense ministries. I was naive.

  A few days after the coup, Burka Bar-Lev, the IDF brigadier general who headed Israel’s mission to Uganda, came into my life. He wanted me to go to a Ugandan town called Jinja, to build a battalion of paratroopers, starting with a one-hundred-man company. Three other Israeli families lived in Jinja on Defense Ministry assignments: two artillery officers, plus Itzik Bar-Akiva, the IDF officer who officially headed the Israeli mission in the town.

  “The Ugandans are fine at parades,” Burka told me. “The British, after all, trained most of them. You’re going to turn them into paratroopers, starting with Amin’s own general staff officers. They’re coming here for a three-week course. You have the entire army at your disposal. Anything you want — airplanes, helicopters, and as much shooting as they want.”

  The generosity astounded me. Even in a sayer
et, we tried to conserve ammo. But as Burka explained it to me, Israel’s business in Uganda was business. “The more ammo they use, the more they’ll buy.”

  A rude awakening from my innocent ideals that said Israel’s aid to Third World countries served nobler interests than mere money, Burka’s straightforward talk about what to expect in Uganda included something else that made us both laugh. In retrospect, it should have been a warning.

  “You’ve got to understand,” he told me about Amin. “He’s like an overgrown child playing with outsize toys,” he said, and then laughed. “You know what he’s asking for now? A submarine. For Lake Victoria.”

  At the time, it did seem funny. “We’ll never give him one, of course,” Burka reassured me. But Amin’s eccentricities did make for amusing stories. (He made ambassadors from countries out of favor carry him on a throne.) Burka left me with the impression that such things could never happen to us Israelis in Uganda. Amin loved Israel, Burka said. And Israel, in the years after 1967, needed all the friends it could get.

  The Soviet Union aligned with the Arabs, using them as proxies against the United States. In Europe, West Germany felt guilty about the Holocaust, but was forbidden by its constitution to sell arms. The French, who sold us arms until 1967, imposed an arms embargo against us after the victory in 1967. I decided not to worry about Amin’s eccentricities and Israel’s African interests, concentrating on the job I’d do and the pleasures that awaited me and Nurit as we traveled the countryside.

  A few days after the Beit Berl course ended, about thirty Ugandan officers showed up in Israel for a three-week paratroopers’ course the Defense Ministry had organized for foreign military officers. A Ugandan brigadier in his forties arrived with his deputy, staff officers, and platoon commanders.

  I had never met such charming, polite people. Educated by the British, they knew military principles, but nothing about combat. They understood logistics and field strategies, but had never planned an operation.