Results for “Sayeret Matkal”

…am. That operation went exactly as planned. Except that the POWs had been moved. I drove to see Yoni and Mookie at the sayeret base. We spent most of the meeting on the opening few minutes of the operation: the rolling out of the vehicles, the drive to the old terminal, and how...

…I was not yet a public figure. Yet to the extent those around me would have taken note — family, university classmates, sayeret comrades, or officers in the Airya — my slight emotional aloofness, my focus on simply getting things done, and the way I internalized setbacks, even tr...

…y exercises, and my nightly stock-taking, I'd somehow missed an obvious detail in our planning. When we got back to the sayeret base, Avraham was waiting for us. “Well?” he asked Meir. “They don’t need me,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.” It was not just a source of reas...

…could see that four of the young men were dead. Another was fighting for his life. Several others were also wounded. A sayeret medic and several senior officers were trying to save the most badly injured man, but I knew I needed to get military doctors and medical evacuation hel...

…emed to have evaporated. I looked into several of the rooms where, months earlier, I’d run through operational plans as sayeret commander. Inside each, a large wall map traced the course of the fighting. Israeli forces were marked in blue, the Syrians and Egyptians in red, with a...

… head of military intelligence; Gadi Zohar, in charge of civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza; my own former sayeret deputy, Danny Yatom, who was head of the central command; and Rabin’s military aide, Kuti Mor. Also included were longtime political and media aide Eita...

…y nickname, Cheetah, he was in charge of the air force’s main helicopter squadron. He had flown both me and Nechemia on sayeret missions into the Sinai. Several days after the war was over, before returning to university, I drove up to Jerusalem to see his family. Cheetah was at...

…eration. We had no formal ties with the Mossad, but our intelligence work occasionally overlapped. In mid-December, the sayeret’s intelligence liaison was approached with a “theoretical question” by a couple of guys from the Mossad. Did we have the capability to attack three sepa...

… bay and to establish some form of human bond, to but withhold anything of genuine value. A few weeks later, the whole sayeret held a four-day exercise in the Galilee. On the second night, at about four in the morning, we shook off our backpacks and settled in for a few hours’ s...

…wful hours. I found Yoni’s death even more upsetting when I learned from Mookie and others how it had happened. As the sayeret motorcade began making its way from the Hercules to the terminal, with Mookie and Yoni in the Mercedes, two Ugandan soldiers had seen them. One of the U...