na operation in 1972, in which Sayeret Matkal commandos stormed the hijacked Belgian carrier dressed as technicians. Ehud Barak is seen here at the head of the rescuers.
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On the night of April 9, 1973, almost exactly 40 years ago, Israeli commandos conducted a raid that shocked the Palestinians and many others around the world. During the raid, known as Operation Spring of Youth, three top Fatah officials were assassinated in their homes in Beirut. The Israel Defense Forces also bombed the organization's headquarters, which housed forces loyal to Nayef Hawatmeh's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Some 50 terrorists were killed. Various weapon production facilities and a workshop were destroyed as well.
Apart from the substantial damage that was inflicted on the terrorist organizations, the operation was a major psychological blow for the Palestinians. The sense of security the terrorists enjoyed in Beirut, that feeling that Israel would not catch up with them there, was shattered. "Spring of Youth made a searing impression in the Arab World ... Israel's message of deterrence spread – the Mossad and the Israelis can reach anyone, anywhere, even in their bedrooms," writes Aaron J. Klein in his book "Striking Back – The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response," which deals with Israel's assassination policy overseas.
The operation was spearheaded by a team of 16 elite fighters from Sayeret Matkal, or as it commonly referred to, "The Unit." They were tasked with the overarching mission of assassinating the three top Fatah officials: Muhammad Yussef Najar (known as Abu Yussef ), who served as deputy to then PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the operations officer for Black September, the terrorist organization behind the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; Kamel Nasser, a PLO spokesman and Arafat's right-hand man; and Kamal Adwan, who was in charge of several terrorist cells in the West Bank and Israel. The team leader was the unit's commanding officer at the time, Ehud Barak, who along with two other Sayeret Matkal fighters, Amiram Levin and Lonny Rafael, was disguised as a woman. That anecdotal fact was partially responsible for the special place this operation has in the pantheon of Israeli raids.
Naturally, the elimination of the Fatah senior leadership attracted the most coverage at the time. But the fighters also had to contend with another, less high-valued target, one that required grace under fire, courage, a willingness to sacrifice, and the ability to keep your head cool at all times, even in impossible situations. That target was the Fatah headquarters. A paratroopers contingent was tasked with that part of the mission. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, then a commander of the Paratroopers' Brigade's 50th Battalion, led the charge. He would later become chief of general staff. Shahak and his soldiers encountered heavy resistance and the two sides engaged in a large shoot out. But the IDF managed to plant and detonate the explosives even in the midst of the battle, bringing the building down. Lipkin-Shahak won a citation for his conduct during the raid. The successful operation cost the lives of two soldiers: Avida Shor and Haggai Maayan.
"Our team had been busy working on a special operation on the Golan Heights front, so because of the compartmentalization, we did not know anything about Operation Spring of Youth," says Avner Shor, who wrote the book "Team Itamar – Sayeret Matkal, the People, the Operations, the Atmosphere," which has recently come out in a new edition. Shor, a member of Kibbutz Shoval and a former Sayeret Matkal commando, may have been kept in the dark on Operation Spring of Youth, but he could tell something was cooking when he saw his brother Avida days before the raid.
"On the Friday before the operation, I met my brother in the kibbutz, and I noticed that he was wearing black boots, not sandals," he recalls. "That seemed strange, so I asked him what was up with that, to which he replied, 'My girlfriend gave them to me as a Passover present,' but I was still skeptical."
The next morning, Avner's team, Team Itamar, was back on the Golan Heights. Avner, and another member of the team, Farhi, were summoned to the team commander's office. "When the paratroopers and The Unit raided Beirut last night, your brother Avida was seriously wounded, and later died, " Itamar told Avner.
"The news of my brother's death took some time to sink in," Avner says. "But this was accompanied by a concern that I would be kicked out of the unit because I was a bereaved brother. The only way to stay was to have my parents sign a waiver. I could not even contemplate asking them to do that. I could not sleep at night. I kept on bracing for the possibility that I would be sent home."
"And so, when that day came, I suddenly came up with a spectacular idea," Avner says. "I asked whether there was someone who could authorize my continued service in the unit even without my parents' consent; I was told only the IDF chief of general staff could do that. So I told them, 'Arrange a meeting.' I met Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. David [Dado] Elazar shortly afterward, and he allowed me to stay. Even today, I am still the only one who got to serve in an IDF combat unit without first obtaining the signature of my [bereaved] parents." There is pride in Avner's voice when he says that.
This unique story underscores the special esprit de corps in Sayeret Matkal, a spirit that keeps it moving. Until not so long ago, all references to the unit's activity, let alone its name, was under a media blackout. But it has produced some of the most famous names in Israel's political and defense establishments: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former premier Ehud Barak, Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon, former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Former Deputy Chief of General Staff Uzi Dayan, Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, Labor MK Omer Bar Lev and others. Nevertheless, there are rare instances where even its veil of secrecy gets lifted, and the public gets a glimpse of the covert activity.
Shor's book does little to clear the fog, but it does allow an unusual vantage point into the demanding and exacting training the unit's fighters have to undergo. Training begins with a 120 kilometer (74 mile) march that culminates with an intense team-building session. This part is designed to turn each team into a family.
"The prospect of leaving the unit, or rather the team [because of Avida's death] would have made me suffer two losses — one that involves a biological brother and another the involves eleven chemical brothers; I would not have survived that."
Former cabinet minister Avi Dichter, who was also on Team Itamar, adds: "People are unaware of how right they are when they call Sayeret Matkal 'The Unit,' with a capital T. For policy makers, the quality of the product manufactured by Sayeret Matkal is unmatched; neither can such quality be found anywhere else. The unit can conduct its raids with other people, but none of the other units can conduct the kind of raids it carries out."
When Dichter is asked to define The Unit's contribution to state security, Dichter does not hesitate. "The Unit allows the state to go beyond the horizon; it is ahead of the state by one or two steps and allows the decision makers to look far ahead. It serves as an avante garde when it comes to operational innovation. The movies "Air Force One" and "Olympus Has Fallen" would qualify as nothing more than an opening scene to a movie on Sayeret Matkal, if one was ever produced.
An absolute bond
Sayeret Matkal was established in the late 1950s by Avraham Arnan as a reconnaissance unit that operated behind enemy lines (according to foreign sources the type of intelligence it collected was SIGINT, or signal intelligence). But the unit now functions as an elite commando force. The unit's first teams were composed of Sephardi Jews (with the exception of Ehud Barak) because Arnan modeled the unit on the pre-state militia, the Palmach, which had special forces tasked with blending in with the local Arab population.
The legendary fighters of Unit 101 and its commander Meir Har Zion were tapped to train the newly formed unit, but this turned out to be an epic failure, at least in the beginning. Eventually, Har Zion approached Arnan and told him bluntly: "You cannot turn new immigrants into good soldiers in three years; you can teach them Arabic but it takes longer than that to adopt a different mind set. So, if you want to have this work, bring kibbutzniks who know how to plough the fields and ride horses. And that is what happened."
Prior to the Six-Day War, the unit's members were the one's who filled in the ranks by courting their friends, mostly from kibbutzim. Then new recruits started coming out of elite schools such as Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium and Hebrew University High School (known as Leyada) in Jersualem, the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and the military boarding school in Tel Aviv.
While Itamar may be just one of many teams the unit has had over the years, its members comprise a unique group of high achievers. Some of them were born into Jerusalem's elite (and hence are called "princes"), some were from moshavim and kibbutzim (communal settlements) and a small number of them grew up in an urban (rather than agricultural) setting. Some of them went on to occupy senior positions in every segment of Israeli society
How do you make such a heterogeneous group share such a strong bond?
"This question goes to the heart of it," says Shor. "How do you make all those people from respected families fit into one melting pot alongside kibbutzim and moshavim members that have nothing in common with them and have no overlapping areas, and then have them emerge from training as one team whose members have all but shed their differences, both in their way of speaking, their level of motivation and the effort they expend in their mission."
"It happens because you live with a tightly knit group of people 24/7 and go through unique experiences that impact you tremendously and build a common bond," Shor explains.
"The group undergoes a process of homogenization, and the team members increasingly start to resemble one another and feel more connected. A key feature in the unit's training and its team-building process is teamwork; team members are taught to work together, that point is driven home quite substantially. That is why today you see many of the unit members occupy key positions in the military and in civilian life, from various industries to politics. They know how to work together.
"When you compare them to the Israel Air Force pilots, who are also a select team of highly talented individuals, you see that while they outnumber those from The Unit, they are less represented at the higher echelons of our society. I believe this is because they [the pilots] are trained to work as individuals; team work does not come as naturally. Those in the Shayetet [shorthand for Shayetet 13, the Israel Navy's commando unit] also undergo more personalized training. Our training was supposed to give us the ability to comprehend one another on an absolute level and have absolute trust in one another.
"The team in the unit is defined by the team members' total dependency on one another, a dependence in the truest sense of the word," says Dichter. "The unit is where the saying 'A chain is only as strong as its weakest link' applies in its most classic sense. A single team member ultimately determines whether an operation fails, and he or she may be the one that saves the day. Pinchas Buchris, a brigadier-general in the reserves who was commander of Unit 8200 that deals with SIGINT collection and the Defense Ministry's director-general, single high-handedly snatched victory out of the jaw of defeat in one particular mission, which is classified, of course. To give you an example of what is means to be a team in the unit, let's say I enter a room in the barracks where four guys sleep, and there is a sock on the floor, in the center of the room. I grab the sock and sniff, then I say, 'Farhi, that's yours.'"
Alongside the efforts to foster team work, the training is very demanding. Not everyone can plough through.
"The first year was very difficult for me," says Dichter. "When I arrived at the unit it immediately dawned on me that I was less prepared than the rest. The kibbutzniks had already met one another, so had the Jersualemites; I was different. I did not come from a major city, I was not a pilot course drop-out and I was not in shape; for example, I did not make it in the 120 kilometer march and was forced to do it all over again with a younger team; I remember how they carried me from the [Suez] canal to the [Jordan] Valley on a Leyland truck so that I could begin the trip from square one."
"I was not sure I would stay," Dichter admits. "It took some time before I was on sound footing. The fact that I had good navigation skills and that I was a night owl helped, and as the training progressed I became more fit. Later, when we were engaged in fighting, I was in charge of the belt-fed machine gun. At that point I had already realized things were okay."
Shor also recalls the difficulties in training.
"They teach you how to set your sights on the highest peak and then conquer it; they tell you that the future of the state rests on the success of your mission, they say that at almost every step of the way. This is largely true. The unit's fighters have received dozens of covert citations, and this makes people develop a sense of superiority. A soldier in the unit gets exposed to the most senior ranking officers in the military once he completes his training; the director of military intelligence attends exercises on a routine basis; the chief of general staff also attends a few each year, as does the minister of defense. Even the prime minister arrives occasionally. There is no way this does not impact 18-year-old boys. To a large extent, the shortcomings that Ehud Barak and others have in their personal behavior, such as hubris and arrogance, can be traced back to what they did as young soldiers."
Ehud Barak as a formative figure
"I disagree with his behavior today, and I think he has hurt the army's moral infrastructure, but his contribution to the unit and to the IDF is spectacular," says Shor. "I have never seen anyone else who matched his leadership skills and levelheadedness. We were with him in very trying situations, which could have escalated into a full-fledged war, but he managed to come out unscathed. He has an intuitive capacity to emerge victorious out of an apparent train wreck. For us, anywhere he set foot became hallowed ground.
"I was carrying his radio equipment in our first operation in the canal," Shor recalls. "We were flown by helicopters and everything went wrong. Everyone in military intelligence had been involved in the planning of the operation over a period of several years but it all rested on the narrow shoulders of Ehud Barak, who was merely 23. And he triumphed, through his capacity to take control of the situation, to improvise and to keep his cool; the operation he presided over was among the most important and the most sophisticated at the time. I still cannot quite understand how he pulled it off."
"I will give you another example," Shor continues. "After Uri Ilan was captured by the Syrians in 1954 (and later committed suicide in his prison cell), then Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered that no operation take place behind enemy lines; with the exception of the Sinai campaign in 1956 [during the Suez crisis] this directive was followed; then came Avraham Arnan, who created the unit, and in 1960 it conducted its first cross-border raid, in Syria.
"As part of the mission, a force was to arrive at a certain point at night; it was instructed to abort the mission if it failed to make it on time. Things got complicated and it was still far from its destination at the designated time. The minister of defense, the chief of general staff and the director of military intelligence were all listening to the radio as they bit their nails. So what does Barak do? He turns off his communication device. Everyone is certain that this is Uri Ilan all over again. At 5 a.m. Barak sends a dispatch: 'The force made it to its destination, it did what had to be done.' He simply did not want to listen to all of their [his superiors'] senseless chatter."
What kind of commanders were the Netanyahu brothers Yoni and Benjamin?
"Yoni [who died in Operation Thunderbolt in 1976 in the IDF raid at Entebbe, Uganda to free Israeli passengers of a hijacked plane] was a tough guy, and we were too young," says Dichter. "During his tenure at the helm of the unit he had to deal with a great deal of criticism. Overall, the unit nurtures high quality, opinionated individuals.
"Not everyone was sent to officers training, but it does not mean they were less qualified than you were," Dichter explains. "There was no such thing as ducking something difficult in the unit; the after-action review was always true to the facts and no words were minced.
"Yoni was the star of the unit. Avraham Arnan, who was involved in selecting the officers even after he had retired, truly loved him. Yoni was like a classic military prince, good looking and eloquent. As soldiers, we couldn't quite crack his code, so we had less of a bond with him. Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] joined the unit even before Yoni. He was just an ordinary soldier, he was the one who suggested Yoni's transfer to the unit from the Paratroopers Brigade. Bibi exhibited something that is very rare: He was very qualified on a professional level and the people under him performed really well, but he was also very popular with his subordinates; those traits usually don't go together, but Bibi managed to pull it off."
What? Aren't you dead?
You describe the Yom Kippur War as a fault line, I tell Shor.
"Yes, this was a seminal event that defined our generation," he says. "It's one of those events that makes you realize that you are no longer the same person once its over. We had all sworn that the [events leading up to] the Six-Day War would not happen again, but then we witnessed how history just repeated itself. It was clear that there was no other way but to make peace; the contours of the peace agreement were there, but Golda [Meir, the prime minister between 1969 to 1974), said no. That is why 3,000 soldiers were killed; only then was the agreement [with Egypt] signed. I fear that this will happen all over again with the Palestinians.
"I am still recovering from that war," Shor continues. "Before that war, we had a sense of security, we felt that we could finally rest. And then on Friday night, Oct. 5 [a day before the Yom Kippur War], we were sent home. And we were the team that had logged the most hours in the IDF's most elite unit, which was probably the best intelligence unit in the world. This, 18 hours before the war broke out! This was a grave mistake."
Avi Dichter recalls the sense of frustration over how the war unfolded.
"Between the wars the unit operates independently, it has no overlap with other units. But when there is war, things are exactly the opposite. You have to work together with the other forces, we are just too small. That is why in the Six-Day War and in the Yom Kippur War the unit basically had to try and play catch up with the war. When the war broke out on Saturday the unit went up to the Golan Heights and because of the enthusiasm it asked for a special mission: to destroy an array of Syrian tanks.
"Yossi Peled [a major-general in the reserves and later a cabinet minister] still believes that he saved my life on that day. He told me later, 'There were 100 tanks there; what could you do? Suppose you had destroyed 80 tanks, you would have still been turned into dust. I showed you guys the door, I would have none of it.'
"After the IDF crossed the [Suez] canal, I arrived at Fayid [an Egyptian airfield] with a paratrooper contingent to prepare it for our aircraft. While I was clearing the booby traps that had been placed on the runway, Amitai Nachmani [one of the team leaders in Operation Spring of Youth], Cheetah, and Amiram Levin took my jeep. An Egyptian force near the field hit it with an RPG. Amitai was killed, Cheeta lost his hearing and Amiram was badly injured.
