By mid-December 1990, war was virtually certain. Misha and I had been to

By mid-December 1990, war was virtually certain. Misha and I had been to Washington in September and agreed with the Americans that, unless we were attacked by Saddam, we would stay out of it. To do otherwise was clearly not just against the US-led coalition’s interests. Given the importance of our alliance with Washington, it was against our inrerests as well. Yet with hostilities obviously getting closer, Misha phoned Defense Secretary Dick Cheney a few days later to remind him of the guid pro quo: we would be kept fully in the loop about the details and timing of the initial American air strikes. At around five o’clock on the afternoon on January 16, 1991, Misha got a call from Cheney. He said “h-hour” would be at seven that evening Washington time. Three a.m. in Israel. Though we hoped to stay out, I’d now spent months coordinating and overseeing preparations to ensure we could attack Saddam’s Scuds if necessary. By far most of the missiles were mounted on mobile launching vehicles, and Saddam was almost certainly going to be firing them from the vastness of Iraq’s western desert. That meant an Israeli air strike alone wouldn’t work. We decided on a joint air and ground operation, built around a newly created air- mobile division and other special units. A force of 500 to 600 soldiers would take control of key areas and road junctions in western Iraq and start hunting and destroying, or at least impeding, the Scud launchers. We also engaged in secret diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we’d have to overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called 7evel, a kind of shadow foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with which, in both side’s interests, we had a channel of backdoor communications. It was headed by Ephraim Halevy, a London-born Israeli who had come to Palestine in 1948 as a teenager. He had built up a personal relationship with King Hussein, and now arranged for us to meet him at a country residence which the king had in Britain. A few weeks before the war, I boarded a private jet to London along with Halevy and Prime Minister Shamir. Shamir had never met the king before and nor, of course, had I. But we didn’t talk about the forthcoming meeting on the five-hour flight. Instead, Shamir opened up in a way I’d never seen: about his childhood as part of a relatively well-off family in Poland; his love of literature, and of the Bible. In a way, it reminded me of how my father had spoken to me when I was growing up — minus the “well-off family” part. 232 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011703