My command of Battalion 532 lasted only a few more months. On April 1

My command of Battalion 532 lasted only a few more months. On April 1, 1974, an official commission of inquiry published its initial report on the war. It was scathing in its assessment of our intelligence failings, for which it placed the main blame the officer who had been promoted the year before as head of military intelligence: Eli Zeira, the man who had addressed us on the sayeret base before the the 1967 and so confidently predicted the outcome. It also took aim at two other commanders. Gorodish, as head of the southern command, was one. The other was Dado. As chief-of-staff, he was held ultimately responsible for the intelligence failings and for not having ordered at least a partial call-up of our reserves. In Eli’s case, I recognized the very fact of our being caught by surprise made his position untenable. In fact, as I learned more details about what had happened, I realized the commission had, if anything, understated the seriousness of his errors. In the run-up to the war, Eli had resisted multiple requests from other intelligence officers to activate what the commission called our “special sources” of intelligence: the communications intercepts we’d planted deep inside Egypt. Worse, he had indicated to the few generals who were aware of their existence that he had activated them, implying that his lack of concern about the possibility of an Egyptian was based on our intercepts. Because Dado was one of the people misled, his fall struck me as profoundly unfair. He had devoted his whole adult life to the defense of our country. After the inquiry report, he was never again the same person. He developed an obsession with fitness and exercise. Psychologists might have called it displacement activity. I wondered whether it was a kind of self-punishment. Either way, it may well have killed him. At age 50, less than three years after the war, he died of a heart attack after a day of running and swimming. Almost every level of command was thrown into flux after the inquiry report. So was the political landscape. Both Golda and Dayan bowed to growing public pressure and resigned. The premium was on finding replacements who were sufficiently experienced, but did not bear responsibility for the errors of the war. For Prime Minister, the choice fell on Yitzhak Rabin. He had strong military credentials, of course. But he had left the army and entered politics, and had been out of Israel for several years as Israel’s ambassador to Washington. He had joined Golda’s government only weeks before the war, in the relatively minor role of Minister of Labor. Much the same thing happened in the army. Only one of the generals who had been in the running to succeed Dado before 159 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011630