Following the engineering company, Harnik’s force advanced toward the fortress. As the soldiers started climbing, they crossed a white gravel path close to the road leading to the fortress. Their dark silhouettes stood out on the white background. “I received an order from Harnik: ‘Forward!’” remembered Motti, a Sayeret detachment commander. “We started to run. We needed to pass along a firing zone on the western side of Beaufort. They opened hellfire on us. You see how the bullets are flying straight at you. I look back and see that there are seven or eight people left! When we started out, we were twenty-one. I tell Harnik that I’m missing soldiers, and he answers, ‘Motti, go ahead. I’ll send them after you.’ In hindsight, I know that, during this sprint through the area, they were simply slaughtering us.” Three Sayeret commandos were killed in the onslaught.
Nevertheless, the Sayeret continued toward the combat trenches leading to the fortress, moving under unceasing machine-gun fire. A team commander and a fighter were the first to jump into the trenches. The trenches were very narrow, and moving within them with full pack and a weapon was extremely difficult. The two continued without trouble until two bursts of fire mowed them down, and both fell to their deaths. But three other soldiers kept running toward the objective with a bag of grenades that they tossed into the ditches.
Meanwhile, Harnik had reached the entrance to the fortress with five soldiers. All around them, the shooting was fierce. Numerous terrorists were killed, others were seen fleeing the site. One stubborn terrorist, hiding at a small position covered in camouflage netting, fired a burst of bullets at Harnik, and the venerated commander was killed on the spot.
The remaining fighters continued clearing the site, aware that their principal problem was the bunker that spewed intense fire. Two soldiers crawled over to it, hurling a large explosive charge and retreating. The huge thundering explosion that followed left no doubt that the bunker had been destroyed.
By 10:00 P.M., the fighting was over. The soldiers counted the corpses of thirty terrorists. Golani had six dead and nine wounded. The news about Harnik’s death left all of Golani and the supreme command in shock. Golan Heights’ hero Avigdor Kahalani, now a commander of the Ga’ash Division, was unable to face the news. “I wanted to believe that there was a mistake, that I would receive another message cancelling the first, but it didn’t come.”
Goni’s comrades were amazed to learn that his mother, Raya Harnik, had darkly foreseen her son’s future. When he was just four years old, she had written a poem saying:
I will not
Sacrifice my first born
Not me.
And when Goni was six years old, Raya had written these chilling verses:
That day I’ll stand, eyes wide open, facing the calamity
My whole life freezes before this tomorrow
A lodestone I am, iron doesn’t cry
I already feel the burning
The dryness in my throat and the looks and the fury
And night after night my life is crying the cry of that day. . . .
Ariel Sharon, with the Beaufort conquerors. (IDF Archive)
The day after Beaufort’s capture, Begin’s helicopter landed by the vanquished citadel. The prime minister was accompanied by Defense Minister Sharon. During a TV interview conducted at the fortress, Begin said that not one of Israel’s soldiers had been killed during the battle, and that there hadn’t even been any injuries. It later came out that no one had bothered to update the prime minister about the outcome of the fighting. This unfortunate comment—along with his question to the soldiers: “Did they have machine guns?”—provoked a harsh response from the public, and particularly among parents whose loved ones had been wounded or killed in the battle.
Meanwhile, during the first three days of the war, battles against the terrorists raged all over Lebanon. The Galilee Division moved on to the coastal plain, going as far as the Litani River. An armored force advanced toward Sidon; the Ga’ash Division progressed toward the town of Nabatieh; and the Sinai Division fought on the western slopes of Mount Hermon, but avoided conflict with the Syrians in the area, even when they opened artillery fire on IDF forces.
But on June 9, Israeli restraint toward the Syrians came to an end. Israel’s request that they pull their forces back to their prewar positions went unanswered, and Israel decided to act with all its might. (See Chapter 11.)
GABI ASHKENAZI, DEPUTY COMMANDER OF GOLANI BRIGADE, LATER THE IDF CHIEF OF STAFF
“As a deputy commander of Golani Brigade, I went through several difficult moments during this battle. The first was when I was informed that Sayeret Commander Moshe Kaplinsky had been wounded. I sent Goni Harnik to replace him, and three or four minutes later, they’re reporting that his armored personnel carrier has turned over in the village of Arnoun, near the Beaufort, and that he has started running on foot, his back badly hurting, to where his soldiers were located. I said to myself, the spine of the command has been hit, and now Goni has disappeared on me. . . . But within a few minutes, Goni shows up on the radio, we speak, the battle goes on and I have the feeling that the situation is under control.
“The second difficult moment was at the end of the battle, when they told me that Goni had been killed, together with five fighters. That really hurt. Goni and I had gone through a lot together, and I felt that I had lost not only an excellent commander but a good friend, as well as an exceptional fighter.
“Given that the battle had been planned for daytime and took place at night, in a situation in which the commanders had been hit, the Sayeret and the engineers company fought in a manner worthy of commendation, and all because of the quality of the fighters, the commanders and their familiarity with Beaufort.
“At the end of the battles, when I descended from Beaufort, I didn’t believe that we would spend two decades there, and that in the year 2000, it would be me, as commander of the northern district, who would evacuate Beaufort and IDF forces from Lebanon.”
The Syrian Army and Air Force treat Lebanon as if it were part of Syria. They have established batteries of ground-to-air missiles in the Lebanese Beqaa. During the war with Lebanon, Israel will be confronted by the Syrian missiles and fighter planes.
CHAPTER 21
“IT WAS A GREAT CONCERT WITH MANY INSTRUMENTS,” 1982
On June 9, 1982, three days after the start of the first Lebanon War, IAF pilots waited with great tension and suspense for the signal to embark on one of the air force’s most complicated missions: attacking Syrian missile batteries in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. In Jerusalem, the government continued to discuss the operation, struggling over fears of an escalation with the Syrians, who were politically and militarily involved in Lebanon. The debate was tense and stretched on for many hours. The time set for the start of the operation was pushed back, and Air Force Commander David Ivry retired to his office to concentrate on the latest flashes from the battlefield. Colonel Aviem Sella, the head of IAF operations, circulated among the pilots, checking their readiness, providing encouragement and trying to ease the tension.
At 1:30 P.M., IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan called the air force commander from the prime minister’s office, telling him, “Time to act. Good luck!” At two, the offensive got under way.
When the green light was given, twenty-four F-4 Phantom jets from IAF Squadron 105 took off, armed with missiles. Soaring alongside them were Skyhawk fighter aircraft, Kfirs—Israeli-made combat jets—and F-15s and F-16s armed with heat-seeking air-to-air missiles. For Israel’s electronic-disruption effort, the air force had enlisted Hawkeye early-warning aircraft, Boeing 707s and Zahavan drones. At the peak of the action, approximately one hundred Israeli planes were in the air.
The Syrians likewise threw roughly one hundred aircraft into battle—MiG-21s and -23s. Nineteen surface-to-air-missile batteries had been spread across the Beqaa Valley, where they were ready to launch SA-3, SA-6 and SA-8 surface-to-air missiles, among the most advanced, state-of-the-art engines developed by t
he Soviet Union.
Surface-to-air missiles were still a source of trauma for Israel’s air force. The war of attrition with Egypt, followed by the Yom Kippur War, had left behind bad memories and a sense of powerlessness against Egyptian missiles. The former defense minister, General Ezer Weizman, had coined the famous phrase “the missile that bent the plane’s wing,” which had motivated IAF commanders to look for a solution to this difficult problem. For five years, the top minds in the air force had labored with members of the military industry to develop a technological response that would protect the planes from the enemy’s missiles and bring the plane’s wing back to its natural place.
Now the hour of judgment had arrived: Would the Jewish brain again come up with an answer? Would the pilots’ nightmare come to an end? Would the IAF reestablish control over the region’s skies?
The attack’s opening move was the launch of drones over the Beqaa Valley, an act of misdirection. The aircrafts’ radar profile had been designed to resemble that of fighter jets, and the Syrians fell into the trap. As Israel’s military planners had thought, the Syrians immediately launched surface-to-air missiles at the drones, exposing the precise locations of their batteries, which in turn became targets for Israeli radiation-seeking missiles. Simultaneously, the IDF ground electronic sensors pinpointed the batteries’ locations and its artillery began shelling them.
Twenty-four Phantoms then suddenly appeared, each carrying two “Purple Fists,” anti-radiation missiles that zero in on radar installations by detecting the heat from antiaircraft systems. The planes launched the missiles at the batteries from nearly twenty-two miles away; also fired were Ze’ev surface-to-surface missiles, a sophisticated short-to-medium-range weapon that had been developed in Israel. The entire time, drones circled above the area, transmitting the results back to the operation’s commanders.
After the attack’s first wave, the Syrian batteries went silent for several minutes, and then the second wave arrived. Forty Phantoms, Kfirs and Skyhawks fired various types of bombs, among them cluster bombs that destroyed the batteries and their crews. The third wave took on the few remaining batteries, and within forty-five minutes, the attack had ended as a complete success. Most of the batteries had been wiped out.
During the offensive, the Syrians had fired fifty-seven SA-6 missiles but had managed to hit just one Israeli plane. For several long minutes, the Syrian command had been in complete disarray, and when it realized its battery system had collapsed, scrambled its MiGs. During the aerial battles that ensued, Israel’s F-15s and F-16s brought down twenty-seven MiGs using air-to-air missiles.
“From an operational standpoint, in contrast to what was planned, the attack on the missile batteries was one of the simplest missions I ever oversaw,” said Colonel Sella, who had been charged with the operation’s ground management. “Everything went like clockwork. As a result, even after the first planes successfully attacked the batteries, I ordered their continued bombing. The perception was that any change, any pause or shift, could only create turmoil that would disrupt the progression of matters.”
Toward 4:00 P.M., Sella reached a decision that he later described as the most significant of his life: to halt the operation. “At this stage, we had already destroyed fourteen batteries. We were an hour before last light, and we hadn’t lost a plane. I believed we couldn’t achieve a better outcome. When I leaned back for a minute in my chair, I took in some air and said to myself, ‘Let’s stop—we’ve done our work for the day. They’re going to bring more batteries tomorrow in any case.’”
Sella went to David Ivry, who was observing the mission with Chief of Staff Eitan. Sella leaned into Ivry’s ear so that Eitan wouldn’t hear and said, “I’m requesting authorization to stop the operation. We won’t accomplish more today. We’ll destroy the rest tomorrow.”
Ivry thought for a moment and nodded in agreement. The handful of planes then en route to an additional attack returned on Sella’s orders to their bases. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon didn’t love the decision, to put it mildly, even criticizing it harshly during a meeting with Eitan. But Sella’s theory that the Syrians would move additional batteries to the Beqaa Valley overnight proved correct.
Over the next two days, Israeli bombers, escorted by fighter jets, set out to strike the new SA-8 batteries relocated by the Syrians. Because of the paralysis of Syria’s defensive batteries, its air force dispatched planes to intercept the Israeli aircraft. In the battles that followed, Israel’s pilots again had the upper hand: eighty-two Syrian aircraft were downed over the course of the first Lebanon War. The Israeli Air Force lost two planes to ground fire. During the campaign, what became known as the “biggest battle of the jet age” took place, involving approximately two hundred planes from the two sides.
“This situation, in which our planes were dominant and the Syrians were in a state of panic, gave us a huge psychological advantage,” Ivry said. “The aerial picture on the Syrian side was very unclear. We added in electronic means for disrupting their ability to aim and keep control, meaning that the Syrians entered the combat zone more as targets than as interceptors.”
When Ivry, who had also been the air force commander during Israel’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor, was asked what his most exciting moment had been, he answered without hesitation that it was the end of the missile attack during the first Lebanon War. “When it became clear that we had succeeded in destroying the Syrian missile apparatus and that not one of our planes was damaged, it was a moment of true spiritual transcendence. This was a struggle involving the entire air force—a big concert with lots of instruments of various types, and everyone needed to play in perfect harmony.”
The missile batteries were wiped out. (AF Journal)
The operation’s success gave Israel complete control over the skies of Lebanon and made it possible for air force planes to freely assist IDF ground forces. Nevertheless, the air force abstained from striking Syrian ground troops, in keeping with a decision made by the cabinet, which feared sliding into an all-out war with Syria. On June 11, 1982, following mediation by the American emissary Philip Habib, a cease-fire between Israel and Syria took hold.
The mission, Operation Mole Cricket 19, was considered one of the four most important in the history of the air force. (The other three were Operation Focus, the assault on the combined Arab Air Forces during the Six Day War; Operation Opera, the attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq, in 1981; and Operation Yonatan, the rescue of hostages in Antebbe, in 1976.) Western air forces regarded the mission as an example of the successful use of Western technology against Soviet defense strategy. The results of the attack caused a great deal of astonishment among the military leaders of the Warsaw Pact, overturning their sense of confidence in the USSR, and particularly in the Soviet bloc’s surface-to-air-missile apparatus.
AVIEM SELLA, SQUADRON COMMANDER
“For the sake of this operation, we developed, with the help of a great team of scientists from the Weizmann Institute, a computerized control and planning system that would make it possible to prepare and command a multivariable campaign: to manage hundreds of planes with hundreds of weapons facing dozens of missile batteries and dozens of radar installations. It was a dynamic system operating in real time with thousands of variables. The primary and most outstanding programmer was a Haredi [Orthodox Jew] who lived in Bnei Brak, Menachem Kraus, who had no formal education but immense and unique knowledge. He was involved in all of the operational programs and, at the moment of action, sat with us in the Pit, in his civilian clothes.
“At the end of the day, we would conduct a nighttime debriefing and discuss what we had learned. I arrived at one debriefing where all the squadron commanders were participating, as well as all the wing commanders and former air force commanders. And, all of a sudden, everyone is standing and starts to applaud me for the perfect operation. I was very moved, because this sort of thing is quite rare in the middle of a war. I also got a little statuette, which was
inscribed, ‘To Sella, the thinker behind the fight against missiles, your vision has been fulfilled and we’re standing tall once again—the fighters of Air Force Base 8.”
PART EIGHT
Fighting Terrorism
After the 1982 Lebanon War, the PLO terrorists and their leaders have been exiled to Tunisia, where they live with total impunity, protected by the Tunisian government. But in 1988, Prime Minister Shamir approves a mission to change that situation.
CHAPTER 22
“ABU JIHAD SENT US,” 1988
March 7, 1988. The Mothers’ Bus, so called because of the large number of women it carried, was on its daily morning trip from Be’er Sheva to the Dimona nuclear reactor. At a deserted stretch of the highway it was suddenly stopped by three men, standing in the middle of the road beside a military vehicle. Only after the men boarded the bus, waving automatic weapons, did the passengers realize that these were Arab terrorists. Panic broke out on board the bus, yet forty of the passengers, all of them workers at the Dimona reactor, managed to escape. The terrorists seized control of the bus and held hostage the remaining nine women and two men. Israeli Special Forces arrived almost immediately, and surrounded the vehicle. The terrorists began negotiating with them over the release of the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli jails. They threatened to murder a hostage every half hour. First among those killed was Victor Ram.
The first intelligence reports that reached the Israeli unit indicated that the terrorists had crossed the border early that morning, coming from Egypt-controlled Sinai, and had hijacked a military jeep on their way. Order was given to the fighters of the Special Unit of Israel’s border guard (Yamam) to raid the bus. Which they did, killing the hostage takers, but not before the terrorists murdered two of the female captives, Rina Pazarkar-Sheratzky and Miriam Ben Yair. During the negotiations, one of the terrorists shouted, “Abu Jihad sent us!”
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