“No, Tuvia,” David responded. “This is something else.”
Feinman immediately sent a Bell helicopter to Umm Hashiba, which returned with the recording reels containing the conversations. Feinman, who knew Russian fluently, listened to the tapes and rushed to the head of military intelligence, General Aharon Yariv. At 8.00 P.M., Yariv held a crash meeting with Minister Golda Meir, and that night she passed along the recordings to U.S. president Richard Nixon.
The recordings were definitive proof: not only were the Soviets supplying weapons to the Egyptians, they were secretly sending military troops and fighter squadrons. The planes were adorned with the logos of the Egyptian Air Force, but they were being flown by Soviet pilots!
This marked a dangerous turn of events. Israel didn’t want to get entangled in a conflict with a superior power. The Soviet Union had been the main weapons supplier to Egypt and Syria (and later to Iraq) from the mid-fifties onward, and again after the Egyptian Army was defeated by the IDF in 1967. Moscow responded to the Egyptian president’s request by sending military experts, advisors, air controllers and pilots. These facts had been kept secret until Israel’s discovery.
Thirty-four Israeli soldiers of Russian background reported the Soviet presence. They were serving in the top-secret Masrega (“Knitting Needle”) unit, commanded by Major Feinman. In addition to training in intelligence, the soldiers had received a refresher course in Russian. They had formed a special subculture for themselves, with Russian underground songs and Pushkin poems, vodka drinking and stories in Russian, and were nicknamed the “Grechkos,” after the Soviet defense minister. As the reports of Soviet involvement in Egypt grew, they were dispatched to the 515th, in Sinai. Bit by bit, they gained mastery of the military terms used by the Russians; however, until April 18, they had only recorded conversations between technical crews. Suddenly, that day, the voices emerging from their radio devices belonged to Soviet pilots.
This raised the latent conflict between Israel and the Soviet Union to a dangerous level. Israel tried not to escalate it. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan instructed the head of the air force, Motti Hod, to halt the attacks deep in Egypt. The United States also advised caution; after all, they said, Israel wouldn’t want a confrontation with a superpower. But the Soviets’s self-confidence only grew; they moved their missile batteries to the shores of the Suez Canal, and their planes pursued Israeli jets on photo-reconnaissance and bombing missions, trying to engage them in combat. On one occasion, they even hit the tail of a Skyhawk with an air-to-air missile; the pilot managed to land at the Refidim airbase, in Sinai.
Meir and Dayan still hesitated. But on July 25, when Israeli Skyhawks attacked Egyptian positions on the Suez Canal, Soviet MiGs appeared in the sky and chased them into Sinai. “Superpower or not,” Meir grumbled to herself, and ordered that Israel strike back at the Russians, as they deserved.
Hod decided to devise an operation against the Russians: an aerial ambush of the sort his pilots had pulled off more than once in the region. David Porat, who had designed ambushes in the past, was chosen to put together something special.
But how does one lay an ambush in the clear blue sky?
Hod established an elite team of the air force’s best pilots and on July 30, 1970, ordered it to spring the trap. The area chosen as the site of battle was a third of the way between Cairo and the city of Suez, close to the Katameya airbase, where the Russian squadrons kept their planes. Israel’s opening shot in the operation—code-named Rimon 20—was the takeoff of four Phantoms guided by Ben Eliyahu from the Ramat David airbase. The planes crossed the Gulf of Suez and started attacking the Egyptian positions next to Adabiya. The Phantoms mimicked Skyhawks fighter jets with bombing capacities but inferior to the Soviet MiGs. The Phantoms kept flying in an “Indian circle” over their targets—imitating American Indians circling cowboys on horseback—with one pilot at a time diving toward his objective, dropping his bombs and returning to the formation. This was a classic Skyhawk tactic. At their radar stations, the Egyptians and the Russians saw four dots circling above Adabiya, and it seemed clear to the ground controllers that they were Skyhawks.
Simultaneously, a dot of light appeared on their screens, passing from north to south at an altitude of twenty thousand feet. The controllers identified the dot as a lone Mirage jet, apparently on a reconnaissance mission. The Israelis were misleading them here as well. The “lone” dot was in fact comprised of four Mirages, which were flying in a tightly compact formation that was made to look like a single plane. The Mirage pilots even reported via radio on the progress of a reconnaissance mission. Together, they were the bait—what appeared to be an unarmed reconnaissance plane and four antiquated Skyhawks. The commander of the Russian squadrons fell for it and decided to unleash his pilots on the easy prey.
The Russians didn’t know that an additional quartet of Mirages had taken off from Ramat David and was flying at low altitude in Sinai, below the mountain ridges, so that their radar stations wouldn’t see them. Meanwhile, four more Mirages, engines thundering, were ready on the runways of the Bir Gifgafa airfield, in Sinai. As Ehud Yonay wrote in his book No Margin for Error: The Making of the Israeli Air Force, Porat succeeded, through this trickery, in “hiding four Mirages and four Phantoms in the blue summer sky, and another eight Mirages not far away.”
The Russians dispatched four quartets of MiGs from the Beni Sueif and Kom Osheim airfields. The first, lead by Captain Kamenev, flew northward, in the direction of the “solo” reconnaissance Mirage, in order to confront it on its journey. The second, led by the squadron commander, Captain Nikolai Yurchenko, was meant to close in on the Mirage with a forceps maneuver from the south. A third quartet, under the command of Captain Saranin, had been directed to strike it from the west. Another formation of four MiGs turned toward the “Skyhawks”; four more MiGs took off a few minutes later. At the air force Pit, Hod pressed a button on his stopwatch and ordered his pilots to attack.
The Soviets were stunned. The “lone” Mirage suddenly became four, which dropped their detachable fuel tanks and turned toward the MiGs. The four Skyhawks suddenly climbed skyward and revealed themselves to be state-of-the-art Phantoms swooping down on the Soviets from on high. Then the four Mirages that had been flying below the Sinai mountaintops burst out, with the quartet that had been waiting on the runways at Bir Gifgafa following in their wake. The voices of the Soviet ground controllers suddenly went silent, as the electronic wizards of the Israeli Air Force blocked their radio channels. The Soviet pilots, accustomed to a constant flow of instructions from their ground controllers, were left disoriented, at a loss for what to do.
An ambush in the clear blue sky. (AF Journal)
The Mirage pilot Asher Snir brought down the first MiG. Its pilot ejected, and the canopy of his parachute fanned out amid the aerial battlefield, where thirty-six planes were clashing. Avihu Bin-Nun and Aviem Sella also shot down two planes, and Avraham Salmon and Iftach Spector brought down two more.
The Russian pilots weren’t used to wild aerial battles in which their customary formations came apart, and there was no ground controller to guide them. Initially, their voices on the radio stayed calm, but as the battle went on, they sounded increasingly frightened, and some shouted, “Abort!” The Russian ground controllers also lost their cool, trying to contact their pilots and calling them by their names. A number of the pilots broke away and escaped toward their bases; others also tried to get away from the Israelis, however, the Israeli planes pursued them. Two and a half minutes into the battle, Hod glanced at his stopwatch and ordered a halt. The Israeli ground controller’s voice emerged from the radio, instructing, “Everyone, cut off contact. Disconnect at once and get out of there!”
The skies indeed cleared at once, and the Israeli jets turned toward their bases. They left behind five burning MiGs in the Egyptian desert; three of the Soviet pilots had managed to parachute, and two were killed.
Moscow was in shock. The next day, Marshal
Pavel Stepanovich Kutakhov, the Soviet Air Force commander, arrived in Egypt to ascertain the reasons for his pilots’ failure. While grim inquiries were held in Egypt, modest parties were held on airbases in Israel. Air force commanders didn’t forget the Grechkos and sent them bottles of champagne. The celebrations’ secret participants, of all people, were the Egyptian Air Force pilots, who had been the butt of numerous insults from the Soviet pilots; the Russians had mocked their inability to take on the Israeli Air Force. This was, for the humiliated Egyptians, a moment of sweet revenge on their Soviet allies.
Within days, the news was leaked to the foreign press, and the story of Operation Rimon 20 exploded in dramatic headlines around the world.
GENERAL AMIR ESHEL, COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE AIR FORCE
“Bringing down the Soviet jets calls to mind one of the events of the War of Independence, when the first members of the air force took down five British planes that had infiltrated southern Israel. There are those who tell us that the Israeli Air Force is good, but only against other air forces in the region, which aren’t at its level. And suddenly we’re battling a superpower—a rival from an entirely different league—and we can handle it. And you achieve a result that is exceptional both in absolute terms and against the backdrop of that time. During that same period, the Americans were fighting the Vietnam War and in other conflicts, and weren’t managing to achieve results like these. Meanwhile, here we are, in one battle—boom!
“Cynics will say, ‘You ambushed mediocre pilots.’ That isn’t true. The Russians flying in Egypt knew what they were doing. They weren’t suckers and knew that failure was forbidden. But our action brought out the Israeli air force’s professional ability, acuity and determination.
“The state of Israel puts the best of its resources into the air force. We’re able to get to places that no one else can—and to get the job done there. An air force plane knows how to attack in Tehran and to do so in Gaza, and it’s in the hands of excellent people.
“Operation Rimon brought together our best attributes, talents and abilities—and is a sort of milestone, a sort of beacon.”
After the debacle of the Arab armies in 1967, several terrorist organizations have stepped into the vacuum and try to harm Israel by a succession of hijackings, bombings and assassinations. The major terrorist group is Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and its secret striking force is named Black September.
CHAPTER 12
WHITE ANGELS ON JACOB’S LADDER, 1972
Reginald Levy, the pilot of Sabena Airlines’ Boeing 707 flying from Brussels to Tel Aviv, felt a surge of pleasant anticipation. Today was May 8, 1972, his fiftieth birthday, and he was going to celebrate it with his wife, Deborah, presently sitting in first class behind him. Levy, a former RAF pilot, born in Blackpool to a Jewish father, felt a special bond to the land of Israel, and Jerusalem was undoubtedly the best setting for marking this significant milestone in his life.
The Boeing was flying high over Yugoslavia when he suddenly felt the brutal thrust of a gun barrel against his neck. He couldn’t see his aggressor, but glancing sideways, he noticed his copilot, Jean-Pierre Arins, slumped in his seat, a mustached man pointing a gun at his head. They were being hijacked.
As he soon realized, his plane had been taken over by four Palestinian terrorists who had boarded in Brussels with forged Israeli passports. The other passengers couldn’t guess that “Zeharia Greid” was actually Abd Aziz el Atrash, “Sara Bitton” was Rima Tannous, and “Miriam Hasson” was Theresa Halsa. Their commander, who would soon introduce himself as “Captain Rif’at,” was Ali Taha Abu-Sneina. The four hijackers were members of Black September, the new, deadly terrorist organization secretly created by Yasser Arafat. This was their first operation against Israel.
Before taking over the plane, the four hijackers had successively used the plane’s bathrooms to take out the weapons they had concealed on their bodies: two handguns, two hand grenades, two explosive belts weighing two kilograms each, detonators and batteries.
Now Rif’at and Atrash were standing in the cockpit, their guns pointed at the pilots. “You will fly to Tel Aviv,” Rif’at ordered Levy, his voice clipped, heavy with emotion. “No tricks! We’ve got explosives and hand grenades.”
“But I am flying to Tel Aviv,” Levy stammered.
“Yes, you are. But now you’ll be following my orders.”
In tourist class, a pretty black-haired girl in a flower-patterned mini-dress gracefully slipped into an aisle seat beside the elderly Hershel and Ida Norbert, who were on their way to meet their relatives in Israel after twenty years of separation. They gaped in bafflement at the young woman, who held a round black box tied to her wrist by a length of wire.
In the cockpit, Rif’at grabbed the microphone. “Attention! Attention, all passengers! Stay in your places and don’t move. I am Captain Kamal Rif’at, of Black September. We represent the Palestinian people. The plane is now in our command. You must obey orders!”
Shouts and crying echoed throughout the plane. Hershel Norbert stared in horror at the girl in the flowered dress, who jumped from her seat, brandishing her box over her head. “God, a disaster!” Ida moaned. Behind her, a middle-aged Israeli woman fainted in her seat. Another woman, Breindel Friedman from Jerusalem, shrieked in fear as she saw two figures emerge from the cockpit. One of them, wearing a nylon stocking over his head, looked to her like a monster. He held a handgun and a grenade in his hands. The other hijacker was shorter, narrow-shouldered, with sallow skin and a black mop of hair that Breindel decided was definitely a wig.
Another female hijacker appeared in the aisle, wearing a light-colored pantsuit; she collected the passengers’ passports in a large bag. She suddenly picked up the flight attendant’s microphone and shouted, “If the Israelis don’t give us what we demand—we shall blow up the plane. Everybody will die—everybody!” Some of the passengers burst into tears. “Help us, God!” a woman shouted in Hebrew. “This is the end!”
The news of the hijacking reached Defense Minister Moshe Dayan while he was on a helicopter tour of Israeli positions along the Suez Canal. “Fly straight to Lod!” he said to the pilot. But the first one to reach Lod airport (later named Ben-Gurion) was the commander of the Central Military District, General Rehavam (“Gandhi”) Ze’evi.
Like Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev and many other senior officers, Ze’evi was a former member of the Palmach, the paramilitary underground during the British Mandate that became the elite corps of the IDF during the Independence War. Skinny to the point of looking like a skeleton, he appeared one Friday night in the dining room of his kibbutz, head shaved, torso naked and a towel wrapped around his waist; the resemblance to the Mahatma was striking, and he won the nickname “Gandhi” for the rest of his life. He had an odd sense of greatness; on becoming commander of the Central Military District, whose emblem was a lion, he brought to his compound two lion cubs that he kept in a cage at the entrance to his office.
And yet, he was an excellent soldier, daring, smart and resourceful. Two years before, several terrorists had hijacked four American airliners, landed them in Jordan and Egypt and blown them up. Gandhi had gathered his staff officers, and amid their smirks and ironical grins had asked them for a response to the hypothetical landing of terrorists in Lod aboard a plane and the taking of hostages. Undeterred by his officers’ attitude he had devised a plan, Isotope, to stop the plane and later overpower the hijackers. When Moshe Dayan and Transport Minister Shimon Peres reached the airport, Isotope was already partly implemented. Commando units were in place and orders had been given to direct the plane to Runway 26, “the silent runway,” which was situated far from the main terminal.
Several senior IDF officers arrived in haste and crowded the tiny third-floor room that had turned into an improvised command headquarters. Beside the new chief of staff Dado Elazar stood the Head of Operations Israel Tal, IAF Commander Motti Hod, Head of Intelligence Aharon Yariv and a few members of S
habak, the Internal Security Service, in civilian clothes. Dayan maintained permanent contact with Prime Minister Golda Meir and kept her informed of the developments.
The plane landed at 7:05 P.M. The hijackers’ scheme was a daring gamble. The very landing in Lod, in the lion’s mouth, was a challenge to Israel’s formidable might. By threatening to blow up the plane with its innocent passengers, the terrorists were placing a gun at Israel’s head that should force her to accede to their demands. But their smart and daring plan had one flaw: they did not realize that Moshe Dayan and his colleagues could not afford to be defeated by terrorists who challenged Israel on its very soil, with the whole world watching.
Using the plane radio, Captain Rif’at stated his demands: Israel would release 317 Palestinian terrorists held in its jails; they would be flown to Cairo immediately. The Sabena plane would wait in Lod airport until the Palestinians landed in Cairo. Then it would fly to Cairo, and there the hijackers would free the hostages.
Dayan, cold and cynical, assumed control of the operation. His main goal was to draw out the negotiations and wear down the terrorists; a military operation should be planned, but only as a last resort. General Yariv was charged with the negotiation with Rif’at. Soon he was joined by Victor Cohen, the head of the Shabak Investigation Department, who spoke fluent Arabic. Yariv politely asked Rif’at, “How much time do you give us to satisfy your demands?”
“Two hours,” Rif’at snapped. “If you don’t comply in two hours—we shall blow up the plane.”
“But in two hours I could barely get fifteen people over here,” Yariv protested.
Actually, the IDF had gotten more than fifteen people over, but they were not the people Rif’at had in mind. The newcomers were the members of the legendary Sayeret Matkal (Unit 269)—the best commando team of the IDF, a unit where only the most qualified and the most daring soldiers could serve. The Sayeret had been created in 1957. Its members and commanders were never identified, its missions never disclosed, and its very existence was protected by rigid censorship. The soldiers serving in the Sayeret were discreetly handpicked, subjected to a variety of tests, then trained at a secret base. The Sayeret was a rumor, a mirage. At its head, in 1972, was a daredevil, Colonel Ehud Barak.
No Mission Is Impossible Page 13