going to happen soon, if only because the intelligence missions now required

going to happen soon, if only because the intelligence missions now required were going to be a lot tougher. Israel now had control of the entire Sinai and the Golan. To tap into enemy communications, we would have to push deeper inside Egypt and Syria. Soon after my return, we began planning the sayeret’s most ambitious mission so far: targeting the main communications system between Suez City, at the southern end of the canal, and Egyptian military headquarters in Cairo. We were obviously going to have to go in by helicopter. But we faced not just the risk of being spotted on the way in. The buildup of Egyptian forces along the canal now included Soviet-made anti-aircraft missile batteries. We might easily get shot down. The mission struck the generals in the kirya as so risky as to border on the insane. But I was confident that we could make it work. I began talking to the few senior air force officers who seemed more receptive, as well as to officers in the helicopter units. Not only had I flown into the Sinai on earlier missions. I now also had a physics degree. Together, we developed a plan — using the desert terrain, and drawing on the helicopters’ maneuverability — to calculate a flight route that could avoid detection by Egyptian radar. As an extra fail-sale, I proposed using three helicopters, and three sayeret teams. Two would fly slightly higher, with the express aim of getting spotted, but still evading missile fire. They would land far away from the real target of the operation. The main team, with me in command, would also stage a pair of diversionary attacks: planting explosives on a high-voltage electricity cable, and on the main oil pipeline from Suez City to Cairo. Still, for many weeks, the answer from the Airya was no. The man who had succeeded Rabin as chief-of-staff after the war, Chaim Bar-Lev, dismissed it as “a plan built on chicken legs.” In the end, what got us the green light was a further escalation, on both sides, in the War of Attrition. In January 1970, Israeli warplanes began a series of deep-penetration bombing raids, for the first time striking targets dozens of miles, in some case hundreds of miles, back from the canal. The Israeli bombing campaign reduced the chance we’d get shot down and provided cover for our operation. Our helicopters took off after sunset, nearly skimming the water and peeling off in separate directions on the far shore. The other two aircraft headed 120 miles to the south. I led the main team of ten men. We set down a few miles south of the road from Suez City to Cairo. We unloaded a pair of Jeeps, drove off, and within an hour had placed our time-delay explosives on the electricity 105 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011576