Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando Read online

  Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando

  Moshe Betser

  Robert Rosenberg

  In this riveting autobiography, Colonel Muki Betser, Israel's premier special-warfare commander and counterterrorist for 25 years, recounts the inner workings of Israel's elite forces which until now no high-ranking military officer has been allowed to reveal. A natural leader, Betser counseled his country's most eminent leaders (Meir, Begin, Shamir, Rabin), then executed their most crucial missions.

  Col. Moshe Betser and Robert Rosenberg

  Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando

  For all my friends

  who fell in the campaigns

  and to my loving wife, Nomi

  INTRODUCTION

  Muki Betser’s life is full of cycles that open and close with historic events in the life of the State of Israel.

  Twice he is called to war just when he expects to go home to family and farm. On one occassion he returns in the most glorious fashion from a country in Africa that he loved and from which he was ignominiously evicted. And when he finally leaves the field of battle, it is because he has survived combat long enough to see his own son join the unit that Muki helped turn into the most elite in the IDF. But perhaps no cycle is as profound as the one that this book represents.

  We began working on it a few weeks before the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993. This introduction was written a few weeks after Rabin was assassinated in November 1995, in the very heart of presumably the safest place in Israel — Tel Aviv.

  “My commander, my general” is how Muki referred to Rabin, using the term in the way former chief of staff Rabin himself meant it to be used by soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces: as much teacher as officer, as much parent as leader, as much friend as manager — all roles that Muki himself filled in his years as an IDF commander. Indeed, if not for the assassination, Rabin might have written this introduction, for the old general turned statesman knew Muki well, going all the way back to when, as chief of staff in 1965, he pinned Muki’s first officers’ bars to the then-young lieutenant’s epaulets.

  So, “if,” as Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, said at the unveiling of the Rabin tombstone on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, “almost all of Israel is now part of the Rabin family,” then Muki is one of the favorite sons in that family.

  A scion of the original pioneering families of the Zionist movement in the early twentieth century, a soldier turned civilian who regards deeds as more important than words, a man who spent nearly twenty-five years fighting terrorism but remained constant in his belief that the only way to peace with the Arabs is by sharing the Land of Israel, Muki Betser is of a generation that grew up believing in what Rabin stood for: a strong defense for the sake of a strong peace.

  The first question I ever asked Muki, when we finally met face-to-face, was “For years you’ve kept silent. Why do you want to tell your story now?” Except for two interviews soon after retiring from the IDF in 1986, he refrained from making media appearances despite hundreds of requests over the years. His decision to work on his autobiography was a surprise — even to himself, I think.

  “Peace is coming,” he told me that hot afternoon in August 1993, before either of us — or the world — knew that in a few weeks Rabin and Arafat would declare the time for bloodshed was over. Nonetheless, it was clear that the Rabin-Peres government was determined to move the peace process forward.

  “It’s our only choice — because we’re now strong enough to make it happen. Reality changed. The Berlin Wall fell; there was a war in the Gulf. The Arab world has changed. So have we.

  “If we did not try to make peace, how could we look in the eyes of the next generation when they ask what they are fighting for. And if the peace process does not work, then at least we can look into our own hearts and know that we tried.

  “It’s important for the next generation to know that all along we fought for peace. My friends say that I have no choice but to tell my story, so that the next generation knows what I know and what all my comrades in the army knew — that when we fought, we fought for peace.”

  I once asked Muki to show me the Sayeret Matkal pin he was given when he first joined the Unit. He promised to look for it, but he never did turn it up. Medals never interested him.

  But framed and hanging in the living room of his home is the personal invitation he received by messenger from then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s office to attend the ceremonies in the Arava Desert where Israel and Jordan declared peace between the two countries.

  That ceremony was, after all, yet another circle closed in Muki’s life — it took place almost a stone’s throw away from where, in 1968, Muki went on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for the first full-scale battle against the PLO, in Karameh, the place where he was wounded so badly he thought he was already dead.

  This, then, is not only the story of a secret soldier. It is the story of a secret dove, for whom peace, not combat, was the purpose of his military service at what the popular press sometimes call “the tip of the IDF’s spear.” And as such, I believe it is an inspirational tale of both courage and humanity that reaches far beyond the borders of the Middle East.

  Robert Rosenberg

  Tel Aviv, November 1995

  CONQUERING FEAR

  One night just before my eighth birthday, my father sent me out after supper to close the irrigation sprinklers watering the fields behind our house. Proud to get the job, which meant hiking to the far end of the field behind our house in the Jezreel Valley, I ran quickly past the familiar shadows of the little cow barn, the corral where we kept our horse, and the chicken coop, up to the edge of the field.

  My pioneering grandparents founded this place, the village of Nahalal, the first cooperative farming settlement of modem Israel. My birthplace, my home, and my world, until that moment at the edge of the dark field, the valley had seemed the safest place in the world.

  Though proud to know my father believed me both strong enough to turn the big iron wheel and responsible enough to make sure no precious water was wasted during the night, I looked out at the dark night and felt fear for the first time in my life. I remembered the old farmers telling stories about wild jackals prowling the valley at night. Their howling sounded like crying babies, a trick to seduce farmers into the fields at night to search for a lost infant — only to be set upon by the ravenous beasts.

  To my eight-year-old ears, those folk tales merged easily with other natural fears in Israel in the early 1950s, right after the founding of the state. In the rhythmic whispering of the sprinklers off in the darkness, I could hear a gang of hidden Arabs plotting to kidnap me. I stood at the edge of the darkness, frozen with fear.

  But in my family’s home in the Jezreel Valley, three values ruled: settling the land, defending the land, and remaining stoic in the face of adversity. I knew I could not turn back without completing the mission.

  A jackal’s cackle broke through the night. It mocked my fright — and left me no choice. Taking a deep breath, I walked stiffly into the dark, listening to my pounding heart. I knew every rut in the dusty path. But the walk that took minutes in daytime became endless, as every sound suddenly seemed foreign.

  The distant jackals, a nearby frog, the rustling of wind in the hay — all the sounds seemed to be conspiring against me. Finally, I reached the iron wheel that controlled the flow of water into the irrigation pipes. Grabbing it with
both hands, I turned with all my might. Just as it closed, a nearby jackal’s howl burst out of the night. And I ran.

  Only when I reached the edge of the pool of light in the backyard did I catch the fright in my breath and stop running, conscious of the need to overcome the panic. Panting, I forced myself to listen to the sounds of the night instead of my heart.

  The jackals continued to howl. A frog belched from a damp patch inside the orange grove my father had planted that spring. Gradually, as I realized nothing had happened to me, my heart slowed down. I began to recognize and identify the sounds instead of running from them in fear.

  Finally, I stepped into the familiar light, knowing that I must overcome the fear, and how I would do it. The next night, even before my father assigned the task, I volunteered. He smiled slightly at my request, as if he knew why I wanted it, and he nodded his approval.

  My second trip began as the first, but when I reached the dark edge I took a breath and walked forward slowly and deliberately, forcing myself to listen and learn from the night sounds instead of imagining what they might be.

  Controlling my pace and my thoughts, I marched past the rows of citrus trees and into the field until finally the house lights were as distant as the stars and I was at the end of the field, the iron wheel cold and moist under my hands.

  Just as I planned, I turned it slowly until the metal screw of the faucet stopped whining and it would close no further. A jackal yelped in the dark.

  I did not run. I listened. The muttering of the sprinklers died away. A soft breeze came down the valley, carrying the sound of a truck’s engine. Closer, a jackal barked. I clenched the damp soil between my toes, and listened for more.

  Finally, when it seemed that every sound, shadow, and movement in the valley became as much a part of me as my callused hands and feet, I began walking back to the distant lights of Nahalal, knowing that I had learned to conquer my fear.

  The lesson has stayed with me my entire life. But in 1968, as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces, deputy commander of the paratroops brigade’s elite reconnaissance unit, I would discover that it was a lesson to be learned over and over again.

  SMOKE OVER KARAMEH

  Like a driver getting on a crowded highway, every soldier goes into battle believing that it won’t happen to him. Except sometimes it does — especially when the plan goes wrong. In 1968, the plan went wrong. The Israel Defense Forces, which had triumphed less than a year before, failed miserably in a battle that could have changed history. And I learned of my own mortality.

  My life seemed perfect in early March 1968.1 was married to my childhood sweetheart, father to a newborn son; my unit was the most famous of all the special reconnaissance forces the IDF calls a sayeret. The newspapers called us the “the tip of the spear.”

  The Arab world vowed to throw us into the sea in 1967. They failed. Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization picked up where the defeated Arab armies had left off. The PLO tried to frighten our people out of Israel. Car bombs killed shoppers in downtown Jerusalem; land mines along lonely roads in the southern desert of the Negev killed tourists on their way to Eilat. By early 1968, the terror incidents had escalated into nearly daily occurrences.

  We could not turn the other cheek. The IDF began pressing the government to authorize an operation to put an end to the terrorism by striking at the PLO’s bases in the Jordan Rift Valley, across the Jordan River in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.

  An arid plain rippled with dry riverbeds called wadis, which carry flash floods in winter when rains fall on the yellow Judean Mountains to the west and the red Edom Mountains in the east; the Rift is all that remains of the great sea that once covered the Afro-Syrian fault dividing Africa and Asia. In the northern half of the Rift, the Jordan River divides the valley with a narrow stream of water fed from the Sea of Galilee. The river flows between a winding ribbon of green banks through the sun-stroked land until it reaches the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. South from there is the Arava’s flatland, all the way to the Gulf of Aqaba at the tip of the Negev.

  Before the generals offered a plan to the government, the army needed intelligence from the other side of the border. In our capacity as a reconnaissance unit, the job fell to the paratroops sayeret. I got the job and was sent to lead an overnight foray into Jordan across the Arava, south of the Dead Sea.

  One evening just after dusk in mid-March, an armored corps officer and an officer from the airborne sappers (explosives experts), followed me across the cold, shin-deep waters of Nahal Arava after a winter rain on the eastern plateau above the Rift.

  The three of us spent the night scouting around two tiny Jordanian villages, Fifi and Dahal, counting a handful of Jordanian military vehicles parked by two little police stations. Back in Israel by dawn, the armored corps officer reported confidently to headquarters that he foresaw no problems for the heavy equipment to get through the mud we had encountered.

  I disagreed. The flash floods of winter sweeping across the flatland left behind a deceptively shallow mud. I reported my views to the intelligence officers who took our reports. But in the senior command’s eyes, the armored corps officer was the expert, not me. Now, they wanted a second reconnaissance mission, to a place far more dangerous than tiny Fifi and Dahal — a town called Karameh.

  A Jordanian farming village north of the Dead Sea just over the Jordan River from Jericho, Karameh became the PLO’s main base in Jordan after the Six-Day War. They turned the sleepy village into the center of international terrorism against Israel and the West. Preaching a rhetorical hodgepodge of pan-Arab liberation, Palestinian self-determination, Marxist revolution, and jihad—Islamic holy war against infidels — the armed irregulars in Karameh plotted for airline hijackings, urban bombings, and assassinations, often with Soviettrained instructors.

  In Fifi and Dahal we counted a handful of Jordanian military vehicles and even fewer armed Palestinians. But at Karameh, said intelligence, more than two thousand armed Palestinians, as well as a few dozen Soviet-backed terrorists from Western Europe and Japan, trained for terror missions. Planning a recon for such a target takes time. The PLO didn’t give us any. A few days after the Fifi-Dahal mission, a land mine blew up a busload of high school children on a Negev road. Several died and dozens were wounded in the worst incident of its kind since 1967.

  One of the advantages in our tiny country is that a soldier is never far from home — or the front. I heard the news of the bombing on the radio during a weekend at home in Nahalal with my wife, Nurit, and our baby son, Shaul. Like me, Nurit was a child of Nahalal, and she was a niece of Moshe Dayan’s. We lived in a little three-room house shaded by two tall date palms planted by Dayan’s father, who, with my grandparents and five other couples, founded the Jezreel Valley settlement in 1922. When we married in February 1967, she inherited Dayan’s childhood home, a few doors down the road from my grandparents’ house, where I was born.

  Hearing the news about the land mine in the Negev, I did not need a radio report to know the government would want the army to react immediately. Like every soldier on active duty in the IDF, even on leave at home I kept my weapon — an AK-47 Kalashnikov — always within reach. I geared up and headed out the front door to my army-issued car, a frog-eyed Citroën Deux Cheveaux.

  Back at Tel Nof headquarters in central Israel, sayeret commander Matan Vilnai took me along to the brigade planning session. The Jerusalem-born son of Israel’s most famous guide to the Holy Land, Matan went to a military high school, choosing an army career early in his life. (He eventually became deputy chief of staff at the end of 1994.)

  As the most junior officer in the session, I kept quiet — but listened and watched carefully — while the colonels and generals plotted the brigade’s maneuvers around Karameh. IDF chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev wanted a plan to punish the PLO in time for the next morning’s government session. He got it.

  It was called Operation Inferno, and for the fir
st time since the Six-Day War, the full strength of the IDF would head east over the Jordan River into the Hashemite kingdom.

  The Bible calls those lands Gilead, home to three of the twelve Israelite tribes that originally settled the Land of Israel three thousand years ago. But self-defense, not longing for biblical homelands, sent us east over the Jordan River in Operation Inferno.

  A precise schedule involving the air force, artillery, armor, and infantry became the blueprint for action. At five-thirty in the morning on March 21, just as dawn broke over the mountains in the east, air force fighter jets would put on a show over the village, dropping leaflets warning Arafat’s followers to surrender or be killed. Very straightforward, the leaflets said simply, ‘The IDF is coming. You are surrounded. Surrender. Obey the army’s instructions. Drop your weapons. If you resist, you will be killed.”

  Meanwhile, tanks and half-tracks would cross the narrow Jordan River over the Allenby Bridge, while north and south of Karameh, the engineering corps put up temporary bridges for more armor to block the village’s flanks. Artillery in the foothills of the Judean Mountains on the west bank of the river backed up the operation.

  When the enemy woke to the sonic booms and the news of their imminent capture, their natural reaction would be to flee east. The tip of the IDF spear — the paratroops’ sayeret—would be waiting, helicoptered to a position east of Karameh to control escape routes into the foothills of the Edom Mountains. If the PLO’s fighters tried to flee into Jordan’s hinterland, we would be in place to catch them. Indeed, if the plan worked, the entire PLO would be arrested in one fell swoop.

  Matan divided the company into two groups, one under his command and one under mine. He took forty fighters, while I took thirty. Just before we began loading the helicopters, Matan took me aside. “Listen, Muki,” he said. “We have some tagalongs.”