Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando
288
Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando
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Overview
Israel’s premier special warfare commander and counterterrorist specialist, Muki Betser, was born in Israel’s Jezreel Valley and grew up to become one of the leaders of his country’s most elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal. Newspapers refer to the sayeret, or special reconnaissance forces, as the “tip of the spear” of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). But Sayeret Matkal—or simply, the Unit—was the cream of that crop, carrying out some of the best-known antiterrorist raids of the last twenty-five years.
In this riveting autobiography, Betser recounts the inner workings of Israel’s elite forces and provides an intimate firsthand account of Israel’s previously classified counterterrorist defense missions.
“[Muki Betser] speaks eloquently of the role of commando units, but also deplores violence, capping his riveting combat stories with a paean to peace that’s all the more poignant because it’s penned by a warrior.” —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802195210 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 337,155 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Conquering Fear
One night just before my eighth birthday, my father sent me out after supper to close the irrigation sprinklers watering the fields behind our house. Proud to get the job, which meant hiking to the far end of the field behind our house in the Jezreel Valley, I ran quickly past the familiar shadows of the little cow barn, the corral where we kept our horse, and the chicken coop, up to the edge of the field.
My pioneering grandparents founded this place, the village of Nahalal, the first cooperative farming settlement of modern Israel. My birthplace, my home, and my world, until that moment at the edge of the dark field, the valley had seemed the safest place in the world.
Though proud to know my father believed me both strong enough to turn the big iron wheel and responsible enough to make sure no precious water was wasted during the night, I looked out at the dark night and felt fear for the first time in my life. I remembered the old farmers telling stories about wild jackals prowling the valley at night. Their howling sounded like crying babies, a trick to seduce farmers into the fields at night to search for a lost infant–only to be set upon by the ravenous beasts.
To my eight-year-old ears, those folk tales merged easily with other natural fears in Israel in the early 1950s, right after the founding of the state. In the rhythmic whispering of the sprinklers off in the darkness, I could hear a gang of hidden Arabs plotting to kidnap me. I stood at the edge of the darkness, frozen with fear.
But in my family's home in the Jezreel Valley, three values ruled: settling the land, defending the land, and remaining stoic in the face of adversity. I knew I could not turn back without completing the mission.
A jackal's cackle broke through the night. It mocked my fright–and left me no choice. Taking a deep breath, I walked stiffly into the dark, listening to my pounding heart. I knew every rut in the dusty path. But the walk that took minutes in daytime became endless, as every sound suddenly seemed foreign.
The distant jackals, a nearby frog, the rustling of wind in the hay–all the sounds seemed to be conspiring against me. Finally, I reached the iron wheel that controlled the flow of water into the irrigation pipes. Grabbing it with both hands, I turned with all my might. Just as it closed, a nearby jackal's howl burst out of the night. And I ran.
Only when I reached the edge of the pool of light in the backyard did I catch the fright in my breath and stop running, conscious of the need to overcome the panic. Panting, I forced myself to listen to the sounds of the night instead of my heart.
The jackals continued to howl. A frog belched from a damp patch inside the orange grove my father had planted that spring. Gradually, as I realized nothing had happened to me, my heart slowed down. I began to recognize and identify the sounds instead of running from them in fear.
Finally, I stepped into the familiar light, knowing that I must overcome the fear, and how I would do it. The next night, even before my father assigned the task, I volunteered. He smiled slightly at my request, as if he knew why I wanted it, and he nodded his approval.
My second trip began as the first, but when I reached the dark edge I took a breath and walked forward slowly and deliberately, forcing myself to listen and learn from the night sounds instead of imagining what they might be.
Controlling my pace and my thoughts, I marched past the rows of citrus trees and into the field until finally the house lights were as distant as the stars and I was at the end of the field, the iron wheel cold and moist under my hands.
Just as I planned, I turned it slowly until the metal screw of the faucet stopped whining and it would close no further. A jackal yelped in the dark.
I did not run. I listened. The muttering of the sprinklers died away. A soft breeze came down the valley, carrying the sound of a truck's engine. Closer, a jackal barked. I clenched the damp soil between my toes, and listened for more.
Finally, when it seemed that every sound, shadow, and movement in the valley became as much a part of me as my callused hands and feet, I began walking back to the distant lights of Nahalal, knowing that I had learned to conquer my fear.
The lesson has stayed with me my entire life. But in 1968, as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces, deputy commander of the paratroops brigade's elite reconnaissance unit, I would discover that it was a lesson to be learned over and over again.
CHAPTER 2Smoke Over Karameh
Like a driver getting on a crowded highway, every soldier goes into battle believing that it won't happen to him. Except sometimes it does–especially when the plan goes wrong. In 1968, the plan went wrong. The Israel Defense Forces, which had triumphed less than a year before, failed miserably in a battle that could have changed history. And I learned of my own mortality.
My life seemed perfect in early March 1968.1 was married to my childhood sweetheart, father to a newborn son; my unit was the most famous of all the special reconnaissance forces the IDF calls a sayeret. The newspapers called us the "the tip of the spear."
The Arab world vowed to throw us into the sea in 1967. They failed. Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization picked up where the defeated Arab armies had left off. The PLO tried to frighten our people out of Israel. Car bombs killed shoppers in downtown Jerusalem; land mines along lonely roads in the southern desert of the Negev killed tourists on their way to Eilat. By early 1968, the terror incidents had escalated into nearly daily occurrences.
We could not turn the other cheek. The IDF began pressing the government to authorize an operation to put an end to the terrorism by striking at the PLO's bases in the Jordan Rift Valley, across the Jordan River in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.
An arid plain rippled with dry riverbeds called wadis, which carry flash floods in winter when rains fall on the yellow Judean Mountains to the west and the red Edom Mountains in the east; the Rift is all that remains of the great sea that once covered the Afro-Syrian fault dividing Africa and Asia. In the northern half of the Rift, the Jordan River divides the valley with a narrow stream of water fed from the Sea of Galilee. The river flows between a winding ribbon of green banks through the sun-stroked land until it reaches the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. South from there is the Arava's flatland, all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba at the tip of the Negev.
Before the generals offered a plan to the government, the army needed intelligence from the other side of the border. In our capacity as a reconnaissance unit, the job fell to the paratroops sayeret. I got the job and was sent to lead an overnight foray into Jordan across the Arava, south of the Dead Sea.
One evening just after dusk in mid-March, an armored corps officer and an officer from the airborne sappers (explosives experts), followed me across the cold, shin-deep waters of Nahal Arava after a winter rain on the eastern plateau above the Rift.
The three of us spent the night scouting around two tiny Jordanian villages, Fifi and Dahal, counting a handful of Jordanian military vehicles parked by two little police stations. Back in Israel by dawn, the armored corps officer reported confidently to headquarters that he foresaw no problems for the heavy equipment to get through the mud we had encountered.
I disagreed. The flash floods of winter sweeping across the flatland left behind a deceptively shallow mud. I reported my views to the intelligence officers who took our reports. But in the senior command's eyes, the armored corps officer was the expert, not me. Now, they wanted a second reconnaissance mission, to a place far more dangerous than tiny Fifi and Dahal–a town called Karameh.
A Jordanian farming village north of the Dead Sea just over the Jordan River from Jericho, Karameh became the PLO's main base in Jordan after the Six-Day War. They turned the sleepy village into the center of international terrorism against Israel and the West. Preaching a rhetorical hodgepodge of pan-Arab liberation, Palestinian self-determination, Marxist revolution, and jihad–Islamic holy war against infidels–the armed irregulars in Karameh plotted for airline hijackings, urban bombings, and assassinations, often with Soviettrained instructors.
In Fifi and Dahal we counted a handful of Jordanian military vehicles and even fewer armed Palestinians. But at Karameh, said intelligence, more than two thousand armed Palestinians, as well as a few dozen Soviet-backed terrorists from Western Europe and Japan, trained for terror missions. Planning a recon for such a target takes time. The PLO didn't give us any. A few days after the Fifi-Dahal mission, a land mine blew up a busload of high school children on a Negev road. Several died and dozens were wounded in the worst incident of its kind since 1967.
One of the advantages in our tiny country is that a soldier is never far from home–or the front. I heard the news of the bombing on the radio during a weekend at home in Nahalal with my wife, Nurit, and our baby son, Shaul. Like me, Nurit was a child of Nahalal, and she was a niece of Moshe Dayan's. We lived in a little three-room house shaded by two tall date palms planted by Dayan's father, who, with my grandparents and five other couples, founded the Jezreel Valley settlement in 1922. When we married in February 1967, she inherited Dayan's childhood home, a few doors down the road from my grandparents' house, where I was born.
Hearing the news about the land mine in the Negev, I did not need a radio report to know the government would want the army to react immediately. Like every soldier on active duty in the IDF, even on leave at home I kept my weapon–an AK-47 Kalashnikov–always within reach. I geared up and headed out the front door to my army-issued car, a frog-eyed Citroën Deux Cheveaux.
Back at Tel Nof headquarters in central Israel, sayeret commander Matan Vilnai took me along to the brigade planning session. The Jerusalem-born son of Israel's most famous guide to the Holy Land, Matan went to a military high school, choosing an army career early in his life. (He eventually became deputy chief of staff at the end of 1994.)
As the most junior officer in the session, I kept quiet–but listened and watched carefully–while the colonels and generals plotted the brigade's maneuvers around Karameh. IDF chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev wanted a plan to punish the PLO in time for the next morning's government session. He got it.
It was called Operation Inferno, and for the first time since the Six-Day War, the full strength of the IDF would head east over the Jordan River into the Hashemite kingdom.
The Bible calls those lands Gilead, home to three of the twelve Israelite tribes that originally settled the Land of Israel three thousand years ago. But self-defense, not longing for biblical homelands, sent us east over the Jordan River in Operation Inferno.
A precise schedule involving the air force, artillery, armor, and infantry became the blueprint for action. At five-thirty in the morning on March 21, just as dawn broke over the mountains in the east, air force fighter jets would put on a show over the village, dropping leaflets warning Arafat's followers to surrender or be killed. Very straightforward, the leaflets said simply, 'The IDF is coming. You are surrounded. Surrender. Obey the army's instructions. Drop your weapons. If you resist, you will be killed."
Meanwhile, tanks and half-tracks would cross the narrow Jordan River over the Allenby Bridge, while north and south of Karameh, the engineering corps put up temporary bridges for more armor to block the village's flanks. Artillery in the foothills of the Judean Mountains on the west bank of the river backed up the operation.
When the enemy woke to the sonic booms and the news of their imminent capture, their natural reaction would be to flee east. The tip of the IDF spear–the paratroops' sayeret–would be waiting, helicoptered to a position east of Karameh to control escape routes into the foothills of the Edom Mountains. If the PLO's fighters tried to flee into Jordan's hinterland, we would be in place to catch them. Indeed, if the plan worked, the entire PLO would be arrested in one fell swoop.
Matan divided the company into two groups, one under his command and one under mine. He took forty fighters, while I took thirty. Just before we began loading the helicopters, Matan took me aside. "Listen, Muki," he said. "We have some tagalongs."
"That's bad news, Matan," I said.
Tagalongs are a phenomenon in the IDF–people show up wanting to get in on the action. Sometimes they are former members of the unit, sometimes from other units. The larger an operation, the more likely that the circle of people aware of the secret preparations will grow. And in tiny Israel, word spreads fast.
More often than not, tagalongs get in the way, especially in a special operations mission, where everything is measured out and planned. Vehicles are loaded so perfectly that every soldier and item has a number, the order in which they go in and out of the transport, or a specific position in a formation, or a task to accomplish. Adding a tagalong means taking someone else out. Matan knew this as well as I did.
"No tagalongs," I said. "Not with me."
"Muki, please ..." Matan asked.
"No way," I insisted. "And you know better," I added, making no effort to hide a reprimanding tone from my captain (something that can only happen in a special operations unit of the IDF, where a soldier's skills are as important–if not more important–than his rank).
Although Matan did know better, as a career soldier he had his own considerations. But I refused to give in–especially when I recognized one of the two tagalongs coming up the walkway.
Tzimel's appearance confirmed everything I felt about lateminute arrivals from outside the unit. A company commander in the brigade when I first reached the sayeret, he made a bad impression on me then. Now, trailed by an air force intelligence lieutenant named Nissim, who claimed to have a background in infantry and wanted to be taken along, Tzimel's appearance in the operation gave me a foreboding feeling.
"No way," I said to Matan, shaking my head, not caring if Tzimel overheard. "No tagalongs. Come on," I insisted. "This operation looks like a lot of fun, but it also could get very complicated. Those people will not be any help. They'll just get in the way. And you know it."
"I'll take one and you'll take one," suggested Matan.
I shook my head. If he wanted to take them on, he could. But I wanted neither of them. "No way," I repeated. "No way I'm going to take off someone who knows the plan to put in someone who doesn't. No way." Like many of my generation from the Jezreel Valley, I am stubborn. Matan finally gave in. I hoped he would send Tzimel and Nissim home. Instead, he added them to his force.
We took off in the dark, in eight helicopters. Half an hour into the ride, the pilots went into a holding pattern because of fog. Five minutes went by, then fifteen, while the pilots did figure eights. There is nothing unusual in an operation's schedule changing in real time-as long as the other forces involved know about the new timetable. When the helicopters resumed their flight path down the Jordan Rift Valley, it never occurred to us on board that central command stuck to the same plan, without taking our delay into account.
I am not saying our job was the most important cog in the operation or that if we had arrived on time, everything would have worked like clockwork. But to prevent the enemy's escape from Karameh, they needed us in the right place at the right time.
Nobody warned us that we lost the element of surprise in the swirl of dust before dawn, our landing camouflaged by the fastchanging light of the desert just as the sun rose over the red mountains of Edom.
My teams scrambled out of the rocking choppers, heading to the formation we had practiced. The choppers left behind their dust storms while we began jogging west to our position above Karameh about six miles away. Our plan said to be there by five-thirty, just as the air show began.
But barely a dozen strides into the hour's run, carrying full gear across the wadis of the Rift east of Karameh, we ran into the enemy.
I don't know who was more surprised, us or the armed Palestinians in their raggedy collection of mismatched surplus uniforms from Arab and Soviet-bloc armies, in sneakers and sandals as well as army boots. None seemed to have helmets, and most wore the black-and-white checkered keffiyot that identified them as Fatah, loyal to Arafat's majority faction of the PLO.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Secret Soldier"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Col. Moshe Betser and Robert Rosenberg.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Conquering Fear,
Smoke over Karameh,
Basic Values, Basic Training,
The Night of the Wells,
Three Stubborn Fighters,
Fighting for Honor,
Not the Six-Day War, the Three-Hour War,
Home-to the Paratroops,
Unfriendly Skies,
Combat-fit,
Red Skies over Jinja,
The Unit,
The Job,
Spring of Youth,
Rules of Combat,
Conquering Sorrow,
Yom Kippur,
The Special Gentlemen Are Here,
Commando vs. Commando,
The Hill Beyond the Valley of Tears,
Going South,
Death in the Mango Groves,
Soul-searching,
Ma'alot,
Dossiers for Action,
Operation Thunderball,
The IDF Option,
Back to Africa,
Epilogue,