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

by Moshe Betser

  One of the many climaxes in the training is a solo four-day personal navigation of more than a hundred miles around the country — which is barely 250 miles long. Not allowed to make contact with any acquaintances, not allowed to use a vehicle, they must leave their mark at dozens of coordinates within certain time limits. They never knew when I might appear, catching them cheating. I trailed them the same way I followed my Shaked recruits.

  The last night of the final drill, the new fighters end up not far from Masada. A short live-fire exercise ends with a run up the mountain to the plateau where Jews of the Second Commonwealth, two thousand years ago, committed suicide rather than be taken alive by the Romans. There, with only the stars and their comrades as witnesses, the gold pins of the Unit are handed out, worn inside the shirt lapel, as secret as the Unit itself. It is a moving ceremony for all involved. But from that night on, they are fighters in Sayeret Matkal, the IDF chief of staff’s most elite reconnaissance force, the Unit.

  SPRING OF YOUTH

  I always understood the Palestinian demand for self-determination. The territories we won in 1967 in a war imposed upon us were, according my understanding, supposed to be used as a card to trade for true peace. I supported border corrections in the Jerusalem area, for example, but disagreed with government policies that put Israeli settlers deep into the territories.

  As far as I was concerned, the only way to peace lay in dividing the country between us and the Palestinians. It meant compromise with the Palestinians. Not with terrorism. No matter what the cause, terrorism outraged me, and as long as the PLO preferred the battlefield over the negotiations table, I wanted to be in the fight.

  By early 1973, we decided to hit them at home, just like in el-Hiam. Only this time, we would end up going beyond the doorstep — to their bedrooms in Beirut.

  The most Western city of the Arab world, Beirut, with its casinos and lidos, its boulevards flanked by French and Italian boutiques, and its banks with their bullion in underground cellars, drew the wealthiest of tourists and Arabs seeking political freedom in the Lebanese capital.

  That very freedom, the result of a tenuous political balance among Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shiite Moslems, and Druze tribes, also made it possible for the PLO to take over sections of the city and large swaths of the country, especially in southern Lebanon. They took West Beirut, in the hills above the port. Refugee camps provided foot soldiers. But the leadership lived well — in large part off money from Arab regimes both supporting the Palestinian cause and afraid of their violence.

  Indeed, after King Hussein threw the PLO out of Jordan in September 1970, Beirut became the world center for international terrorism. Land-mine factories, arms depots, narcotics smuggling, and PLO training camps became as much a part of Beirut’s landscape as the bikinied girls on the beaches. Terror groups like the IRA in Ireland, the Red Brigades in West Germany, the Red Army in Japan, and the Shining Path in Latin America sent their operatives to PLO headquarters in Beirut for training in the latest terror techniques.

  In the fall of 1972, a Fatah force, including some Western European terrorists — allegedly including Carlos the Jackal (though our briefings never pinned him down there, and never referred to him by the nickname given him by the popular press) — pulled off the most audacious act of international terrorism until then. Calling themselves Black September, in memory of the Palestinian defeat in Jordan in 1970, they kidnapped our Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games.

  The hijacking captured a global audience for the terrorists’ message-the eradication of Israel — and immediately put the Unit on alert. As far as we knew at the time, our unit was alone in the world with any capabilities for such rescue operations.

  While Sayeret Matkal organized into a task force to fly to Germany, Mossad chief Zvi Zamir flew ahead to make the arrangements. But the Germans turned down Zamir’s offer of help, saying their security forces would handle the problem.

  They did — botching it badly. Eleven Israeli athletes died in a bloodbath at the Munich airport. After a morning memorial service, the Games went on.[1]

  The trauma of the Munich Olympics Massacre struck deep into the soul of Israel. Many remembered the last Olympics in Germany, in 1936, when Hitler used the international sporting event as a tool to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the world. In 1972, Bonn wanted the Olympics to demonstrate Germany’s full rehabilitation into a Western democracy with a thriving economy. Every Israeli watching the horror of the drama in Munich in 1972 thought of Germany and the Holocaust. Once again, Jews died in Germany simply because they were Jews.

  Obviously, we could only rely on ourselves to bring those responsible for the crime to justice. Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the entire military and intelligence community to target the people who had planned and executed the attack on our athletes, an extraordinary request for revenge. Mossad agents shot it out with Palestinians in Western Europe all that summer, in a twilight war of espionage and assassinations. And in February of 1973, Ehud came back to base from a meeting at the kirya, the Defense Ministry and IDF compound in downtown Tel Aviv, and called in the Unit’s top officers. Settling in around the brown Formica-topped T-shaped table in his office, he looked pleased. He opened a brown cardboard folder on his desk and pulled out three grainy photographs.

  “Mohammed ‘Abu Yusuf’ Najar, chief of Black September,” he began, laying down the first photo like a playing card.

  “Kamal Adouan, in charge of PLO terror attacks inside Israel as PLO chief of operations,” he said with the second. “And Kamal Nasser, Arafat’s spokesman,” he said, slapping the third card onto the table.

  These three men had organized almost all the terrorism against Israeli targets since 1968. We knew their names. But Ehud’s expression suggested the intelligence brief contained more than pictures. He pulled out a map of Beirut.

  “The two Kamals,” he said, referring to Adouan and Nasser, “live on the second and third floors of a building on the corner of a side street at the end of Rue Verdun in the neighborhood of A-Sir. Here.” He pointed to an area inland from the port. “A pretty fancy neighborhood,” he said, and then threw down the clincher: “Abu Yusuf lives across the street.”

  We all immediately understood. We looked around the table at each other, already knowing what lay ahead. But then Ehud surprised us again — with a trump card. “We have the architectural plans of their apartments,” he said, pulling out the next stack of documents from the folder. “So, can we get them?”

  Sayeret Matkal never turns down an assignment — or a challenge. We began working that night, starting with a brainstorming session, the first stage in planning any operation. Ehud encouraged new ideas, rejecting nothing out of hand. He created an atmosphere in which everyone felt free to suggest the wildest as well as the safest approaches to an operation.

  Hierarchy in Sayeret Matkal is very different from any other unit in the army. Friendly and intimate, candid and open, rank plays no role in a planning session, where inventiveness and originality are more useful than military tradition or conventional doctrine. Gradually, the best ideas are set aside for further development. Eventually, the best idea stands out.

  Fueled by black coffee and dark tea, we quickly ruled out helicopters, which would eliminate the element of surprise. Besides, Raful’s paratroopers had used that method of arrival in December 1968 when he landed in Beirut’s international airport for an hour, to blow up thirteen Arab airliners in retaliation for the bombing of an El Al plane about to take off in Athens. And we never repeat our methods.

  “Tourists,” said the brief we came up with. We would arrive by sea, riding into the shoreline aboard rubber Zodiacs powered by outboard engines.

  From the beach we needed to get to the targets, about ten kilometers away inside the city. The Mossad provided the information about the terrorist leaders’ apartments. It also provided cars. How many cars depended on the size of the force, which raised the question of firepower. Disguised as civi
lian tourists — and limited to whatever vehicles the Mossad arranged — we would have to carry our entire arsenal under our clothes. Explosive charges to open the doors to the targets’ apartments had to be compact enough to carry on our body, or in an innocuous bag.

  At our request, Israel Military Industries had already begun development of a mini-Uzi. And we needed silencers in case of interference on the way — and the guards we expected to find.

  Eventually, we created a three-unit structure under a front field command-and-control position standing guard against interference from Lebanese police — and arriving PLO defenders. Run by Ehud, the command-and-control station in the street below the apartments would maintain contact with the floating operational headquarters in the mother ship that brought us, while three squads hit the three apartments simultaneously.

  We marked all the known PLO holdings in the city, to avoid any contact with them on our way in and out of the city. We figured on twenty minutes from the first shots until PLO and Lebanese reinforcements arrived on the scene. By then, we should be back on the beach, getting into the boats for the ride home. By reducing the number of fighters to the absolute minimum, we could reduce the number of cars we needed to three.

  After the Munich Massacre at the Olympics, Golda wanted to go after “the heart and brain as well as the feet and hands of the terrorists.” Moshe Dayan decided to turn our mission, which a computer called “Operation Spring of Youth,” into the centerpiece of a wider operation that night.

  A force drawn from the paratroops brigade, led by Amnon Shahak — who would eventually succeed Ehud as chief of staff in 1995—got the assignment to hit the six-story headquarters of the world’s airline hijacking experts, George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two other forces, paratroops and the Shayetet (the navy’s sayeret of commandos), were to raid weapons-manufacturing facilities and fuel dumps that the PLO maintained in the Tyre-Sidon area.

  Each unit planned its action independently, and except for a handful of the most senior officers, each unit knew nothing of the other operations planned for the same night. Indeed, to keep field security at its tightest, none of the chosen fighters knew the true identity of their targets until a week before the mission.

  Already at the first brainstorming session, I asked Ehud for the toughest of the three assignments on the mission. He gave me a grainy passport-size photo that I carried in my shirt pocket from that first night on. I wanted no doubt in my mind the night I met my prey.

  Constantly refining our plans, we quickly realized that if we had already decided to go in as tourists, we should enhance the disguise by making some of us women. The smallest, most baby-faced fighters among us got the job. With a barrel chest and a baby face, Ehud looked perfect as a brunette, while tiny Amiram Levine, and Lonny, a soldier I picked for my team, looked good as bleached blondes.

  While they got hold of wigs and dresses — grenades would fill out their chests into ample bosoms — the rest of us went one-by-one to a men’s shop on Allenby Street in downtown Tel Aviv. When the fifth big guy in two days came into the shop asking for an oversize jacket, the owner guessed something was cooking. Field security sent around an officer to warn the haberdasher to keep his mouth shut.

  We worked with a constant flow of intelligence, starting with the gold mine of the architectural plans. Intelligence reported two or three guards stationed outside the two apartment buildings — unless Arafat visited. Then, they doubled and tripled the guard for the PLO chief’s late-night visits. We planned for that as well, hoping for it like a bonus.

  Israel Military Industries sent over mini-Uzi prototypes, but they were not ready for the job. We tried some foreign-made, light-weight, and compact submachine guns, but they jammed too often to trust on such a mission, so we decided to go back to the tried-and-true Uzi as the weapon to hide under our sport jackets.

  I ran the small-arms drills with silenced nine-millimeter Berettas, instead of the twenty-twos I had learned from Dave during my air marshal training. We all practiced shooting from a moving vehicle, and changing drivers on the wheel, in case something went wrong and we needed to drive ourselves.

  For explosives, we decided on a very accurate, lightweight, and flexible explosive developed by a golden-handed Sayeret Matkal gadget-maker to take out a lock with a very concentrated, precise blast. But just in case, a fighter from each team carried an attaché case with extra weapons and combustibles, including quarter-kilo rolls of the explosives.

  Learning to move as a group through a residential neighborhood — without being noticeable to an outsider — became a top priority. We practiced every night at a construction site in north Tel Aviv’s Tochnit Lamed, quite similar to the neighborhood layout and architectural style of A-Sir in Beirut. Four- to eight-story apartment buildings lined the quiet streets. In twos and threes, the “women” matched up in couples with three men, we walked through the neighborhood. Ehud, barely reaching my shoulders, put his arm around my waist and I put my hand on his shoulder, a pair of lovers out for a stroll.

  Chief of staff Dado Elazar lived only a few blocks away in Neve Avivim, another apartment complex in north Tel Aviv. Almost every night he showed up to watch us. One night he stopped Ehud and me, walking arm in arm.

  “What do you have under there?” Dado asked with a sly smile, and reached for my jacket buttons. I let him search me. I carried four grenades on my waist, the Uzi slung into an underarm holster I had wired to make into a custom fit, a Beretta in a second holster under the other arm, and eight magazines of thirty bullets each in pouches that I had sewed into the sport jacket’s inside lining. Dado grinned at my hidden arsenal.

  If he asked Ehud, the Sayeret Matkal commander could have shown him a similar armory hanging from a web-belt sewn under the skirt, and an explosive cleavage under the oversize faux-Chanel jacket.

  Over and over, we moved through the neighborhood into the two almost-finished apartment buildings standing opposite each other at the end of the short street, breaking off into four separate forces — three for the apartments, and Ehud’s force in the street. Over and over, I ran up the stairs with my teammates Lonny and Zvika Livneh, counting each flight to make sure we did not get off at the wrong floor, each time slicing seconds off the time until it worked perfectly.

  Our training in the populated neighborhood presented an extraordinary field-security problem. One night, a neighbor from the nearest occupied building about seventy-five meters away called the cops.

  Chief paratroops officer Emmanuel “Mano” Shaked, overseeing the entire operation, sent us into hiding when the blue flashing lights of the police car slowly turned into the street where we practiced. Alone in an empty construction site in the middle of the night, Mano probably appeared mighty suspicious to the blue-uniformed patrolmen, who did not recognize him. Luckily, Dado came by. Everyone in Israel recognizes the chief of staff. He swore them to secrecy and told them to forget what they had seen. No report ever appeared in the police logs, though afterward, when the world headlines blared reports of our action, they probably figured out what we were doing there.

  One night, after one of those long practice sessions in Tochnit Lamed, a soldier from another force in the mission came to me with a question. “Muki,” he began hesitantly. “There is no backup on this mission, is there? I mean, if something goes wrong …”

  “That’s true,” I said, right back at him. That unanswerable question gnawed at us all, but none dared voice it. The IDF does not believe in suicide missions.

  I decided to call a meeting of the task force. I thought out my speech carefully. “We’re going on a very unusual operation,” I began, “a civilian target in the heart of a city. The targets will have guards. They also might be armed, themselves. Civilians live all around them, and we have to be extremely careful not to harm them.

  “We have a lot of good intelligence. But the best intelligence we have is that these are people with blood on their hands.” I paused to let my words
sink in. “We are taking a relatively great risk. But we are convinced,” I said, knowing I spoke for all the officers who planned the raid, “that the level of risk is logical and reasonable.

  “If we do it right, we can get away without any harm. But anything can happen. That’s true. If it does, we need to stay cool, take heart, and remain confident that we know how to manage.”

  I looked around at them, only a couple of years younger than me. I felt confident in all of them, and told them so. “And because I have that confidence, I am convinced we will succeed.”

  Nobody asked a question. But I wanted to make one more important point. “This is the first time that, as a unit, we are targeting a personal enemy by name and not encountering them as anonymous enemy soldiers. But as far as the government of the State of Israel is concerned, these three people are war criminals. We are deliberately taking revenge for what happened in Munich. We want this enemy to know our anger, and to fear it.”

  Yonni wanted to take part from the start. But as Ehud’s deputy, he filled in as acting commander of the Unit while Ehud focused entirely on the preparations for the mission. On all such operations, there is complete compartmentalization. Indeed, other than those of us on the mission, Yonni was the only person in Sayeret Matkal, aside from the participants, who knew about the operation. Seventy-two hours before the mission, he burst into my office. “Muki, listen, I just spoke to Ehud, and he said that if it is okay with you, I can join your team.”