One of the captured Golani soldiers was a 19-year-old named Uri Ilan, the

One of the captured Golani soldiers was a 19-year-old named Uri Ilan, the son of a member of the Israeli Knesset whom Ben-Gurion and the whole of the government knew well. The soldiers’ captivity dragged on until they were finally returned to Israel in March 1956. By then, however, Uri Ilan had hanged himself. He managed to hide a note into his uniform. It was found when the body was being prepared for burial. It read: Lo bagadeti. Nekamah. “J did not betray anything. Revenge.” Ever since the Uri Ilan mission, there had been a de facto ban on cross- border intelligence operations by Israeli soldiers. Ben-Gurion and his military commanders knew, of course, the importance of getting early warning of an enemy attack. But they decided the price of possible failure was simply too high. Sayeret Matkal was born three years later. Avraham was still part of the unit running low-level agents in Syria and Lebanon, but his commander reluctantly agreed to allow him to set up his new intelligence group. His initial “headquarters” was a sparsely furnished Tel Aviv apartment. The first people he brought in were veterans of the Palmach’s Arab Platoon, pre-state fighters who trained themselves to pass as Arabs and gather intelligence, or stage raids, behind enemy lines. Next, he invited friends who had served in Unit 101 and Company A. Finally, he enlisted a core of them to help train recruits to his new sayeret. He hoped the involvement of these commando veterans would also give the unit credibility inside the kirva. One of them, Micha Kapusta, had been part of 101, as had Itzhak Gibli, who had been a teenage Palmachnik in 1948. A third was another Company A officer named Aharon Eshel, known as Errol, in part for his undeniably Errol Flynn-like swagger, but also an acronym of his Hebrew name. But the crowing addition to the group had the distinction of having led the last successful Israeli bugging mission on the Golan, in addition to being the most respected commando in Israel, a man who Dayan would later call the country’s greatest soldier. It was Meir Har-Zion himself. I was part of the second group of recruits to Sayeret Matkal, in the early summer of 1960. The unit had been given its own base barely a year earlier. Bu it had yet to carry out a single mission, and there was no sign of that happening. Avraham couldn’t be sure when, or if, the generals in the kirya might give him 58 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027906