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

by Moshe Betser

  For a second time, sudden silence descended on the neighborhood like an envelope sealing it off from the rest of the world. The shooting halted. Barely two minutes had passed since we hit our targets. I ran toward our car. The door flew open. I threw myself head-first into the front seat beside Ehud. The car lurched forward.

  “Hey!” we heard a shout from behind, “don’t forget me!”

  Zvika flung open the door, and Yonni jumped in, too.

  “Go!” Ehud commanded, and the driver began speeding out of the intersection, down the hill, while Ehud used the radio to collect reports from the other two Mossad cars.

  Amitai Nahmani’s task force reported that all went well. But in the third car, a fighter named Aharon was wounded. When the shooting started, Kamal Nasser had hidden under his desk with a gun and managed to get off a single shot that wounded Aharon in the leg before the terrorist leader was killed by the team commander, Zvika.

  Ehud cut off the radio contact and we rushed in a crazy race down the hills of Beirut. The Mossad drivers knew the city and they knew the big American cars well enough to make them slip and slide around the corners as we raced along. No whooping and shouting broke out inside the getaway car. Each man sat alone with his thoughts, alert for enemy forces taking chase.

  As we passed a gas station, a uniformed attendant ran into the street, waving at our speeding car to slow down.

  “Shoot him, Muki,” Ehud said quietly beside me.

  “He’s a gas jockey, not a cop,” I said just as quietly.

  We passed the man. I did not shoot him.

  A few blocks out of the neighborhood, the drivers slowed down to normal, quiet driving. Thus we made our way down to the shore road and started heading south on the highway to the landing spot. But half a kilometer before the gravel road that led down to the beach to our rendezvous with the Zodiacs, a routine patrol in a Lebanese Army armored personnel carrier rolled slowly along the road, scanning the shore with their klieg lights. We did not want any more shooting, especially so close to escape.

  Tense with expectation that their lights might yet uncover the naval commandos waiting for us on the dark beach, we crawled behind them instead of passing, a civilian car respecting the army’s right of way.

  For a very long minute we crawled behind the APC, like frustrated commuters stuck behind a wide truck on a narrow road. The path down to the beach approached. The APC passed it. We slowed down even more, easily taking the turn.

  On the beach, we tumbled out of the cars, running toward the naval commandos waiting for us. We left the cars behind, and the Mossad agents joined us on the rubber boats. But we remained silent until far past the surf line. Our plan said the whole thing would take twenty minutes. From the time we landed on the beach to the time we left was exactly half an hour.

  Only when all the troops from the other forces operating in Beirut that night reached the missile boats did they learn what had really happened. Two main task forces went into Beirut that night, ours and Amnon Shahak’s paratroopers, who hit Habash’s headquarters.

  Three top leaders of the PLO lay dead in our wake. And the six-story headquarters of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was demolished. But the attack on Habash’s headquarters cost the lives of two of our boys. Amnon Shahak, who had won a first medal at Karameh, won another for valor, keeping his cool as he rescued wounded soldiers.

  The question came up after Spring of Youth whether we hoped to catch Arafat that night in Beirut. I had missed him at Karameh because of bad planning. In Beirut, the planning was excellent. We did not go in expecting to get Arafat, but hoped for that kind of icing on the cake. Arafat regularly visited those three apartments, and usually worked late at night, the hour we chose for the mission. But Arafat also never stayed in the same place for very long, lest he turn into a sitting target.

  The mission filled the newspapers the next day, of course. The raid against three of the most notorious terrorists in the world inspired gushing praise from many of the Western world’s newspapers. In the Arab world the rumor went out that we escaped through the American embassy in Beirut. Nonsense, of course. But the Lebanese government collapsed.

  None of our names — or the very name Sayeret Matkal — appeared in the papers. But I understood why the eyewitness reports in the Lebanese press described “two beautiful she-devils, a blonde and a brunette, who fought off the police and army like dervishes with machine guns.”

  RULES OF COMBAT

  Ehud Barak left the Unit in June 1973 for studies in the United States, choosing a very special person to replace him as commander of Sayeret Matkal — Giora Zorea. Strong-willed and principled, Giora came from Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, rising from soldier through squad commander in Sayeret Matkal. He came from a tradition of iron-willed fighters — his father, Meir, had enlisted in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army to fight the Nazis in World War II, and eventually rose to become a general in the IDF. Giora made a name for himself as honest, an extraordinary soldier, and an independent thinker.

  But Giora was only a reserve captain. So, to give him some experience, six months before the handover, Ehud sent Giora to Egoz to do my old job — commander of the reconnaissance company. A forty-day course for armored infantry company commanders would follow before he took the handover from Ehud. But after the stint with Egoz, Ehud signed him up for a three-month course. It didn’t take long for Giora to decide that he could live without being commander of Sayeret Matkal if it meant more courses. Like me, he wanted targets and action, not theory and routines.

  He packed his bags and went back to Ehud. “Thanks, but no thanks,” Giora said. “I really don’t need this, you know. I’m going back to the kibbutz.”

  “I still want you to replace me,” Ehud insisted.

  “I don’t have the patience for another course,” said Giora, a stubborn kibbutznik. Within a few weeks, Ehud convinced Dado that Giora was right for the job.

  Promoted to major without any formal training as a company commander, Giora took over Sayeret Matkal. For his deputy he chose Amiram Levine, a career officer who would become a general in 1992, and in 1994 head of the Northern Command. Yonni went to the national staff college, an advanced-studies academy run by the army, Defense Ministry, and Foreign Ministry.

  That left Amitai Nahmani and me as the two most veteran regulars on the officers’ staff, the two senior captains in the Unit. And I began looking ahead to mustering out and going home to Nahalal.

  Interested only in special operations, in “the little army,” which I loved for its position at the very tip of the spear, eighteen months of service in Sayeret Matkal seemed to be enough for me. Back at home, Nurit had ailed ever since our return from Africa, and though our families helped, I wanted to be with her and Shaul.

  But that spring, just before Giora took command, he came to me with the request that I stay in the job for a few more months. “You know the Unit better than anyone,” he said. “Please stick around. At least as long as it takes for me to come to grips with the job,” he said. I did not expect Giora’s acclimatization to take very long. Instead of leaving the Unit in September 1973, to begin civilian life in Nahalal, I agreed to stay through October. Little did I know that once again, just as I readied to muster out of the army, war was going to change my life.

  Spring of Youth hurt the PLO but did not stop terrorism. So my military career continued. Sometimes we planned and practiced for a specific operation, like Spring of Youth. Sometimes we took an assignment on a few hours’ notice.

  One Friday afternoon Giora ordered the staff to assemble a large force at the Ramat David air force base in the Jezreel Valley as soon as possible. “Take all operational gear for a hijacked plane — and make sure everyone wears a clean, pressed uniform,” he added, without any other explanations. It didn’t take long for us to get to Ramat David, across the valley from Nahalal, and learn the mystery. “We’re going to intercept an Iraqi commercial airliner carrying George Habash
,” Giora told us at the air force base.

  Amnon Shahak’s attack on Habash’s headquarters during Spring of Youth demolished the building and killed many terrorists, but it cost two Israeli lives and did not eliminate Habash. Best known for plotting airline hijackings, Habash broke away from the PLO, which he regarded as too moderate.

  A medical doctor preaching extremist Marxism, his international connections with neo-leftist organizations like the Japanese Red Army and West Germany’s Bader-Meinhof gang helped him mastermind his campaign of international terrorism against Israel — and the West. His operatives attacked targets throughout Europe, as well as Israel, and aided other international terror groups with their operations.

  “He’s on a routine shuttle flight from Beirut to Baghdad, probably traveling with bodyguards, as well as the ordinary passengers on the flight,” said Giora. ‘Two combat pilots will pull up behind the Iraqi airliner, out of sight of the commercial plane. They’ll get on the pilot’s frequency and say that he should follow them back to Israel — or else we’ll shoot him down.”

  It was a bluff, of course, but one that no Arab airline could dare call, especially after what had happened in Sinai a few months earlier, in February. Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi had long offered a million dollars to the family of any pilot who flew a planeload of explosives into downtown Tel Aviv. When a commercial Libyan jet appeared on the Israeli Air Force’s early-warning radar scopes coming out of Egypt into Sinai toward the center of Israel we took Qaddafi’s threats seriously.

  Fighter jets scrambled to meet the Libyan plane, trying to make radio contact with the pilot. But he ignored all their calls. The plane flew on. The decision rose all the way to Dado, at home. He made the fateful decision.

  The black box found in the desert proved the pilot made the mistake. Lost in a sandstorm, his airplane carrying more than a hundred passengers, he ignored the calls to follow the fighters to an airport. They all died.

  The tragedy shocked Israel and the world. The government offered compensation to the victims’ families and eventually paid through a third party in Europe.

  But the tragedy also made it possible to try capturing Habash. No commercial airline pilot would ever again ignore an Israeli Air Force (IAF) interception. As seriously as we took the Libyan threat, they would take ours. “Tell them there’s been a technical malfunction and you’re flying back to Beirut,” the IAF pilots would instruct the Arab pilot if anyone on board noticed he was changing course.

  The passenger jet took off from Beirut at eight that night, giving us about an hour to prepare its reception at Ramat David. We knew what to do. We had drilled it hundreds of times. An hour gave us plenty of time to prepare.

  Waiting near the end of the runway, hidden in tall grass beside the tarmac, we would follow on foot as the plane rolled past, breaking up into separate crews for each of the openings to the plane: the emergency exits above the wing and in the rear, a hatch underneath the cargo area where an interior door leads to the passenger cabin, and of course, the main door behind the cockpit.

  My El Al experience made it clear to me where I wanted to be: the main passenger door at the front, on the left-hand side of the plane. While my comrades dealt with getting in through closed doors, the airline stewardess would open the door for us, thinking they had landed in friendly territory. Giora wanted us in clean, pressed uniforms, our paratroops wings shining, the red berets on our heads, and pistols, not Uzis, drawn. “I want him to see the dignity of the IDF compared to his terrorists,” Giora said. And I wanted to be that first Israeli soldier Habash saw.

  We deployed a few minutes later, when word came through Intelligence that the plane had taken off: Half an hour went by, then twenty minutes, ten, five. Finally, the plane lights appeared on the horizon, two fighter planes escorting it from behind. The plane touched down and then raced down the tarmac toward us, while the two fighters swept up overhead and then looped back down for their own landing on another runway.

  We had prepared for a Boeing with Iraqi markings. A Caravelle, with Lebanese airline markings, raced past us in the dark. With no time for questions, we sprinted onto the tarmac in two columns. The columns broke up into teams running with ladders to their break-ins.

  The crew slapped the ladders against the wall of the plane and I ran up it first. Just as I expected, a stewardess opened the door. Confusion froze her face. I rushed past her silently, and while the other three members of my break-in team took the cockpit, I burst into the passenger cabin corridor, scanning passengers’ faces just the way I did for eighteen months with El Al security. But instead of moving slowly down the aisle in civilian camouflage, my weapon hidden beneath a sport jacket, I wore pressed IDF fatigues, with dress-metal bars instead of cloth epaulets, and carried my pistol cocked and drawn, ready to fire at any opposition from Habash or his guards.

  I shouted the English phrase “Hands up!” and in an instant they all understood, throwing their hands in the air. I strode the length of the cabin, looking right and left, pistol ready, looking for Habash. But he was not on board. Just then, Amitai Nahmani broke through the back door, the second squad into the plane.

  “You can relax,” I said, disappointed. “He’s not here.”

  “What do you mean he’s not here?” Amitai asked. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve already looked. You can search, but he’s not here.” Amitai headed down the aisle toward the front of the plane, where some of my soldiers already stood guard, and I began to follow. As I reached the middle of the plane, I noticed fighters on the wing struggling with the emergency door from the outside.

  Locked from the inside, the door implodes inward when released from the outside. In the passenger seats in front of it, a woman and two children sat petrified with fear. The door was going to cave in on them. Pushing against it, I tried shouting to the soldiers outside to stop. “Habash isn’t here” I shouted. But stopping a Unit force in mid-action is impossible, especially if they think they are about to get their hands on George Habash.

  While I pushed against the door with my shoulder, I yanked the woman to her feet and hustled her kids out of the way. With the civilians finally clear, I stood back from the emergency door. It blew inward, soldiers tumbling in after it. By then, officers and soldiers swarmed through the plane, pistols drawn, the realization dawning on them that Habash had never gotten on the plane.

  The plane sat at the end of the runway, lit up by klieg lights; rows of chairs and desks sat beside it, where interrogators sat questioning all the passengers. Base commander Zorik Lev, who would be killed a few months later in the Yom Kippur War, arranged for food and drink — sandwiches and fruit juice — for the frightened passengers. Gradually, they calmed down when they realized we were looking for Habash, not them. The interrogators uncovered three suspected terrorists on board the plane — small-fry, not the arch-terrorist we hoped to find. A couple of hours after the plane landed, it took off, with the passengers on board, including a Libyan ambassador and a Lebanese minister.

  It turned out that at the last minute, the Iraqi Boeing developed a technical problem, so the airline rented the Caravelle. But Habash, concerned for his security, postponed his flight when he heard the routine flight schedule had changed. His office said that Habash was sick that day. To this day he is said to be ill, but that has not stopped him from killing many people.

  From the moment Giora explained the operation, I had my doubts. Trying to capture the man who practically invented airline hijacking as a form of terrorism, we hijacked an airplane to do it.

  Nonetheless, while I felt the attempt to capture Habash by intercepting a civilian plane undermined our own moral policy against terrorism, I regarded the international diplomatic reaction as hypocritical. Instead of joining forces against airline hijackings, they did not care if Arabs and Jews killed each other as long as we left air traffic alone.

  CONQUERING SORROW

  In the early 1950s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister,
visited Nahalal. He called on the second generation of farmers in the established farming settlements to give up a year on their own farms to help new immigrants flooding the country to establish new farming settlements in other parts of the country.

  My uncle Koba and my father’s uncle Garni took up the challenge. As so often happened in Nahalal, they relied on relatives to take care of their farms. My father took Gami’s livestock to our new farm in Moshav Bet Shea’rim, across the fields from Nahalal. At the end of the year he would return it all — but we could keep any offspring from the livestock.

  Overnight, the barn and coop filled with cows and chickens. But to my eight-year-old eyes, the greatest wonder was the horse. We could not afford tractors yet, nor did we have a car or jeep. The horse, and its wagon, became our sole means of transport. I quickly learned to ride it bareback, and spent hours on it, riding the Jezreel Valley.

  A year later, when the time came to return the livestock, my father decided to get our own horse. My father heard of a shipload of horses brought by the Zionist movement from Bulgaria to Israel to sell to farmers at cost. My brother Udi, at eleven, three years older then me, went with my father to get one of the horses from Kibbutz Hahotrim, on the other side of Mount Carmel from our moshav in the Jezreel Valley. All day long I waited anxiously for their return with our new horse. At dusk, my father walked in the front door. He had taken the bus home. Udi rode down the mountain and across the fields to our farm.

  With night falling fast, my mother worried. But my father, as usual, said little, except that Udi would show up safe and sound. I waited up far past bedtime for the clip-clopping of the horse carrying my brother into the yard, bringing the horse to the new corral my father had built for it.