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

by Moshe Betser

  The police had already thrown up roadblocks to prevent people from getting near the danger zone. I realized that while I wore my uniform, my civilian vehicle would undoubtedly be stopped by a police roadblock around the danger zone, slowing me down on my way through the quiet little town overlooking the Jordan Rift Valley.

  Ahead, I saw a police barrier, two portable fences partially blocking the two lanes of the road. Realizing that my car fit between the two blue fences, I drove slowly up to the barricade, as if readying to listen to the policemen. The cops approached to ask what I wanted. I gunned the engine, spun the wheel, and sped through the opening, the policemen jumping backward out of the way while I raced through the town toward the street I had found on the map.

  Less than a minute later, I came to a halt in the front yard of one of the little four-story apartment buildings on the street, thinking I had reached a parallel road to the one where the terrorists field the house. I turned off the engine. Suddenly, a familiar sound snapped in the air near the car. A grenade’s detonator. In another four seconds, an explosion would erupt.

  Leaping from the car, I ran for cover to the side of the house. The grenade burst like a thunder clap, followed by a long burst of bullets at my car. The fire came from the third floor of the apartment house overlooking the yard where I had parked my car. As soon as the burst stopped, I raced back to my car, grabbed the duffel bag from the backseat, and high-tailed it to where Raful and some officers from his command made a field command in a yard behind an apartment building across the street from the building where the terrorists were holed up.

  Raful smiled at me as I ran up to him and his officers, apparently forgetting his earlier reprimand of the Unit. “I came straight from home when I heard,” I explained, joining the circle of officers from Northern Command.

  “Listen,” Raful said to me. “There’s a ladder in place to get to the third floor. You get up there and see what’s going on inside.”

  “No problem,” I agreed, buckling my web-belt. I crossed the quiet street in a zigzagging run, but no shots rang out in the street after me. Beneath the building, out of the terrorists’ view, I found the ladder and propped it to an open window on the second floor. Raful’s intelligence officer told me that the ladder led to an apartment next door to the one the terrorists held.

  I climbed quickly, and discovered an elderly woman in her living room, petrified with fear. I field up a finger to signal her to stay quiet. “Get me out of here,” she wept.

  “Just sit quietly and everything will be all right,” I promised her. I went through her tiny flat to the doorway and stepped into the stairwell. I put my ear to the hijacked apartment’s door, hearing a muffled conversation in Arabic.

  The job looked very straightforward. Break down the door, identify the terrorists, and kill them. I went back to the elderly woman’s apartment. “I’ll send someone for you,” I promised her, and headed back down the ladder.

  “Okay, Raful,” I said, back at his command post across the street. “We have to break in. That’s all.”

  “Good,” he said. “Put together a crew,” he suggested, pointing to soldiers from his command arriving on the scene, “and I’ll provide covering fire with the Border Police.”

  I spent a few minutes trying to find soldiers ready to join me. But nobody volunteered. It is not the kind of job that you can make someone you don’t know do, just by giving an order.

  But as I rejoined Raful to break the news, the familiar sound of Sikorsky rotors beating the air came from the south. A minute later, Giora Zorea, Sayeret Matkal’s commander, appeared on the scene.

  I took Giora back through the elderly woman’s flat to show him the situation. She sat quietly, not saying a word as we came through the window and crossed her little living room. For a few minutes we stood in the corridor, listening to the muffled voices speaking Arabic inside. Using hand signals to communicate, we agreed that we could do the job with half a dozen fighters.

  It only took a couple of minutes, and we went back down through the woman’s apartment, finding a second Unit chopper had arrived, led by Nehemia Tamari. Giora’s deputy at the time, he eventually rose to become a general, but died tragically in a helicopter accident in 1994.

  Giora and I agreed that I’d wait for Nehemia, brief him, and we’d break in together at the head of a team of six to eight soldiers. It took a few minutes, and Nehemia and I were moving quickly to the building’s front entrance along the edges of the wall, out of sight of the terrorists in the second floor apartment.

  I gave the fighters Nehemia picked for the job a brief run-down: second-floor apartment, hostages, at least two terrorists. The idea was simple: move quickly — and quietly — up the stairs, take out the front door to the flat with a burst at the lock, break in, and take out the terrorists.

  We exchanged quick glances, I gave the nod, and we went up the stairs to the front door of the apartment. In place around the doorway, a short burst at the door lock from one of the fighters blew the door open, and we raced in. Bullets cut down one terrorist in the living room before he managed to get off a shot. A second ran into the little side room off the living room.

  “Grenade!” shouted Moshe from the break-in crew, announcing that he was tossing one into the little room after the fleeing terrorist. We all leapt for cover into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind us.

  The four seconds to the explosion went quickly, especially when we realized that, in our haste, we had left Moshe behind, pushing at the door to let him out. One of his comrades flung it open, and Moshe lunged out as the grenade’s blast shattered the apartment. Nehemia’s face twisted in pain in front of my eyes as a sliver of hot metal sliced into his upper left arm while we burst back in, ready to fire.

  A dead terrorist lay bullet-riddled in the living room, his partner blown apart by the grenade in the little room. We found the hostages in their bedroom, an elderly couple already killed much earlier that morning when the terrorists broke in.

  Done with the job, we found Shimon Peres waiting with Raful and Giora. We gave them a brief report, and after Peres made a short speech congratulating us, we dispersed. The two helicopters lifted off, carrying the Unit back to base. I went back to my car.

  Only then did I discover that a bullet pierced its roof when the terrorists fired at me on my arrival. It shattered the windshield on a trajectory that would have pierced my head if I had not gotten out in time. I smiled at my luck and, after stashing my duffel bag in the trunk, brushed the broken glass off the driver’s seat and went on my way.

  Later, on the radio going home, I heard that a mob stormed the building to take revenge on the bodies of the terrorists, throwing them out the window while people below waited to make a bonfire from the dead bodies.

  In their hysteria, the mob also burned the bodies of the elderly couple killed by the terrorists. It shamed us that our people acted in such a barbaric manner. Terrorists or not, it was detestable behavior.

  DOSSIERS FOR ACTION

  I never liked the idea of medals. Usually, they are rewarded when something went wrong, and by isolating some people’s courage, they ignore others’. I understand that armies need medals. But I never allowed one to be sought for my work and I never argued for or against a medal for anyone else.

  My ambitions were different. I wanted to make real my theory that standing battle orders could be prepared for special operations during warfare. I did not care about the big army. Indeed, I often felt the ranks of bureaucracy to be no less a battlefield for me than the Golan or the Sinai. I wanted special operations to make the IDF more efficient protecting the state, the land, and the people of Israel.

  As reserve commander of Sayeret Matkal, I sat down with every man under my command, planning to do something unprecedented in the Unit — clean the stables. I knew who had done well in the war and who had not. I knew who had missed reserves for a long time and who had aged prematurely. It shocked everyone, even the handful of supporters who knew my
goal, but I cut a couple of dozen men from the Sayeret Matkal roster, making sure they ended up in another unit of their choice. In addition, under orders from the chief of staff, I moved another thirty fighters and officers from Sayeret Matkal to the armored corps, which was mauled during the Yom Kippur War and needed talented officers and combat-experienced soldiers.

  But more than winnowing out fighters no longer fit for the Unit, I needed to create an infrastructure to support my plans to buck more than a decade of tradition set by Avraham Arnan.

  I began with only two supporters: Giora and Yekutiel “Kuti” Adam, then deputy chief of staff and in line for the top job in the army. As deputy chief of staff, Kuti field the purse strings to any preliminary budgets I needed to create dossiers for action for the Unit in time of war. We needed specialized equipment and logistical support from the air force and, sometimes, the navy. We needed to be able to requisition whatever we wanted for an operation, without the need to go through the quartermaster’s office.

  For a long time I worked half-time at ChimAvir and half-time in the reserves, lobbying for my plan from outside the army. But that summer Yonni came back to the Unit, appointed commander after Giora left. Yonni had spent two years in the armored corps after the Yom Kippur War, serving as a battalion commander. He was knowledgeable about my operational concepts and asked me to come back to the Unit on a full-time basis.

  I worked systematically inside the bureaucracy, going to officers with influence, whether generals or captains. When I ran into opposition, I moved on to someone more influential. A lot like battle, my strategy aimed at creating a fait accompli, and my tactics depended on finding the soft spots in the opposition. Some opponents had functions so critical to my success that I could not let go. I sat them down and let them pour out their arguments, and then I argued back until I won them over.

  Benny Peled, commander of the air force, saw the need for the air force to have a special warfare unit and supported my cause.

  But while I worked for a long-term goal, a more pressing need seemed to be upon us. The terrorist buildup in southern Lebanon was being met with heavy use of airpower. It was clear to me that the airpower could be effective but that it had some very serious disadvantages. Planes could miss their targets, hitting innocents and undermining our moral position, and more often than not, the terrorists managed to get out of the buildings before they were hit. I believed in the lesson of el-Hiam and Spring of Youth — the most effective way to challenge terrorists was to hit them face-to-face, surprising them.

  And, once again, just as the PLO picked up where the Arab armies left off after the Six-Day War, they did the same after the Yom Kippur War. Fatahland, in south Lebanon, became even more violent. The army responded with two methods — big sweeps into sectors of south Lebanon, to push the terrorists north, and precision bombing by the air force to hit their command posts in Lebanon.

  I lobbied for the IDF to use us the way they had when we went to el-Hiam with Egoz or into Beirut in Spring of Youth. I remembered my lessons well: surprise an enemy on his home turf. Pinpointing the military commanders and avoiding any harm to innocents would be far more effective than a hundred tons of explosives. It field true in between wars, and it field true during wars, as well.

  I went into meetings with the bureaucracy with a prepared speech in my head and a readiness to answer any question they threw at me. “Gentlemen,” I always began. “There is a big difference between hitting buildings and hitting people. The terrorists know the air force can hit them. They are on alert for the air force. But the air force hits buildings, not terrorists. Nothing is accomplished by that. They just move to another building.”

  But the army, especially Motta, was so taken with the air force’s ability to inflict physical damage from the air without putting people at risk that it began canceling special operations for the Unit, just because the air force could handle the target.

  I tried to explain to them that less risk exists in a special operation planned ahead of time, down to its most minute detail, than in any large-scale operation involving thousands of troops, heavy vehicles, and artillery support. A well-prepared operation gives the advantage, through initiative, to the attacker, not the defender. “That’s why terrorism works — and that’s why counterterrorism works,” I explained to all who would listen.

  Chief of operations Moshe Levy backed us in the Unit, but the chief of staff’s policy focused on bringing technology and firepower to bear on the battlefield. I felt we were forgetting the traditions of the early Jewish defense movement. Our strength never lay in our sheer force but in our creative use of that force. From the Unit, we kept sending plans for special operations to hit terrorist command-and-control centers in Lebanon, but while we generated support for our plans from members of the general staff, the chief of staff, Motta, remained opposed. And in the army, the chief of staff has the final word.

  So I decided to go over his head and take the very rare course of action of initiating a meeting with Moshe Dayan. I usually waited for him to ask for my ideas. Moshe still lived in Zahala, outside Tel Aviv. After years of being a hero, he suddenly found himself regarded as a villain by many Israelis, who blamed him for the Yom Kippur War. I still regarded him as a friend and an extraordinarily original thinker.

  I called and asked to see him. I took Amiram with me. “Fine,” Dayan said after we finished the presentation. “I agree. But what do you want from me? I’m not defense minister anymore.”

  “Motta’s opposed, we believe,” I said. “How do we get past him?”

  Dayan thought for a second. “I can speak with Shimon,” he finally decided, referring to Defense Minister Peres, a longtime political ally. “I’ll ask him to meet with you two.”

  Sure enough, a few days later I got a call from one of Peres’s advisers. Since it was entirely outside of channels, I was told to make the arrangements to see Peres through his wife, who told me to come to their apartment in north Tel Aviv at ten o’clock the next night.

  While Sonia plied us with tea and sandwiches, Amiram and I talked to Peres for two hours, concluding our presentation by handing over a paper outlining our ideas for using special forces, in addition to airpower, against the terrorists in Lebanon.

  Peres listened carefully, occasionally asking a question. He never served as a rank-and-file soldier, but he spent most of his life working for the defense of the country.

  When we finished, Peres thanked us for coming and showed us to the door, with a promise to take the plan to his people. We did not know whether that meant Rabin or Motta.

  But a few weeks later, when we were presenting yet another proposal for a night operation by the Unit against a terrorist base in Lebanon, the chief of staff surprised us by authorizing our mission.

  The lesson I learned was clear. I wasn’t a career officer, so I was unafraid of the bureaucracy. I could stand up for what I believed, just as my parents had taught me. And in this case, if what I believed meant going over the chief of staff’s head, so be it.

  OPERATION THUNDERBALL

  Neither day nor night exists in the Pit, a huge underground bomb shelter containing a warren of concrete tunnels and cinder-block offices under the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv.

  Bustling non-stop with young secretaries, technicians, and both desk officers and senior front-line officers, the Pit is the central junction of information flowing into the army and orders for action flowing out to units in the field. All year round, twenty-four hours a day, that windowless, fluorescent-lit complex is the thumping heart of the IDF.

  I was in the pit on June 27, 1976, in a meeting with colleagues from operations, intelligence, and the air force. With Sayeret Matkal commander Yonni Netanyahu and his new deputy, Yiftach R., down in Sinai that week on an operation, I was also duty officer for the Unit in case of an emergency.

  A major stuck his head into the narrow office where half a dozen of us sat around a long table working on plans for an operation under considerati
on. “We have a hijacking,” he said. “An Air France plane out of Greece.”

  I reached for the phone. “Air France flight 139,” the major continued. “It left Tel Aviv for Athens this morning. They landed fine. Took off fifteen minutes ago to Paris.” I checked my watch. It was a few minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon. “The hijackers took the cockpit a few minutes ago. Signals intelligence picked up the communications with Athens control tower,” he was saying when Rami answered the phone at the base.

  “They just called from operations,” Rami said.

  “Good. Get the team to the airport on the double,” I ordered. “I’ll meet you there.” Fifteen minutes out of Athens meant barely an hour from Israel. Sayeret Matkal teams were well practiced at the routine to get to the airport quickly for just such an emergency. And I could reach the airport in half an hour, if traffic permitted.

  Nowadays, a modern four- and six-lane highway connects Tel Aviv to the airport. In those days, the route to the airport led through the residential towns east of Tel Aviv. My mind raced along with the car as I dodged through traffic, running an occasional light, thinking about which method to use to take down the plane if it landed at Ben-Gurion.

  Ever since the Sabena rescue in the spring of 1972, the Unit had kept developing doctrines and methods for rescuing hijacked planes on the ground. We never use the same ploy twice. Just as we learn from each incident, so do terrorists.

  A few weeks earlier, we had showed the general staff a new way to handle a hijacked plane on the ground, totally different from the method used for the Sabena rescue four years earlier.

  As I pulled into the airport, I decided on our latest method as the first option. We could be ready in time for the hijacked plane’s landing, if it headed for Israel. I flashed my ID to the guard at the main gates to the tarmac and drove onto the landing field, where I could see the Unit’s crews already organizing their gear. But as I got out of the car near the small hall we used in such instances, word came that the plane was heading to Libya.